Temple of truths most eloquently spoken,
Shrine of sweet thoughts veiled round with words of power,
The '_Author's Mind_,' in all its hallowed riches,
Stands a cathedral: full of precious things;
Tastefully built in harmonies unbroken,
Cloister, and aisle, dark crypt, and aery tower:
Long-treasured relics in the fretted niches,
And secret stores, and heap'd-up offerings,
Art's noblest gems, with every fruit and flower,
Paintings and sculpture, choice imaginings,
Its plenitude of wealth and praise betoken:
An ever-burning lamp portrays the soul;
Deep music all around enchantment flings;
And God's great Presence consecrates the whole.
Now at length, in all verity, I have said out my say: nor publisher nor
printer shall get more copy from me: neither, indeed, would it before
have been the case, for all that Damastic argument, were it not that
many beginnings--and you remember my proverbial preliminarizing--should,
for mere antithesis' sake, be endowed with a counterpoise of many
endings. So, in this second parting, let me humbly suggest to gentle
reader these: that nothing is at once more plebeian and unphilosophical
than--censure, in a world where nothing can be perfect, and where apathy
is held to be good-breeding; _item_, (I am quoting Scott,) that "it is
much more easy to destroy than to build, to criticise than to compose;"
_item_, (Sir Walter again, _ipsissima verba_, in a letter to Miss
Seward,) that there are certain literary "gentlemen who appear to be a
sort of tinkers, who, unable to _make_ pots and pans, set up for
_menders_ of them, and often make two holes in patching one;" _item_,
that in such possible cases as "exercise" for "exorcise," "repeat" for
"repent," "depreciate" for "deprecate," and the like, an indifferent
scribe is always at the mercy of compositors; and lastly, that if it is,
by very far, easier to read a book than to write one, it is also, by at
least as much, worthier of a noble mind to give credit for good
intentions, rather than for bad, or indifferent, or none at all, even
where hyper-criticism may appear to prove that the effort itself has
been a failure.