The following remarks may be thrown into the form of a series of postulates, which are, at the same time, so many similes.

Many authors (Young is an instance) set fire to their nerve-spirit, which, like burning spirit of another kind (brandy), tinges every person who stands round the inkbottle where it is flaring with a sham DEADLY pallor. But, unfortunately, each looks only at the others, none looks into the mirror. The effect of the proximity of this universal mortality all about, upon people and authors, is that each is impressed with a livelier sense of the exceptional nature of his own immortality; and this is remarkably comforting to us all.

The consequence is, as it seems to me, very plain. Poets, living in fifth, or fiftieth floors, may make poems, but not marriages; neither may they keep, nor establish, houses. Canaries’ breeding cages have to be more roomy than their singing cages.

If this be so, then, what does the author’s pen do? Like a child’s, it traces in ink the characters which nature has faintly marked in the reader with pencil.

The author’s strings only vibrate in unison with the reader’s octaves, fifths, fourths, and thirds—not with his seconds or sevenths. Unsympathetic readers do not become sympathetic ones; it is only the cognate, or congruent, sort which rise to the author’s level or pass beyond it.

And with this stands or falls my fourth postulate. The iron shoe of Pegasus is the armature of the magnet of truth, increasing its power of attraction; yet we are hungry birds, and fly at the poet’s grapes as though they were real ones, thinking the boy a painted one, when we really ought to be frightened at him.

The transition from this to the fifth postulate is a self-evident matter. Man has such a high opinion of everything in the shape of antiquity, that he prolongs it, and keeps it alive, and lives according to it, though it be but the cover and the mask of the very poison which will destroy itself. There are two proofs of this proposition which I leave aside, of set purpose; the first is, Religion, which is all gnawed to worm dust; the second, Freedom, which is quite as much crumbled to powder as the other. In my capacity of a member of the Lutheran Church, I merely glance at the subject of relics (in support of the proposition)—relics, in the case of which, as Vasquez the Jesuit informs us, if they chance to be entirely eaten up of worms, we must continue to worship what remains—that is to say, the worms which have eaten them. Wherefore, meddle not with that nest of worms, the time in which thou livest, or it will eat thee up; a million of worms are quite equal to one dragon.

This must be admitted and assumed, at least if my sixth postulate is to have any sense in it which is,—that no man is wholly indifferent to, and unaffected by, every kind of truth; indeed even if it be only to poetical reflections (illusions) that he swears allegiance—inasmuch as he does even that he thereby does homage to truth; for in all poetry it is but the part which is true which goes to the heart (or head), just as in our passions and emotions nothing but the Moral produces effect. A reflection which should be nothing whatever but a reflection would necessarily, for that very reason, not be a reflection. Every semblance (meaning every thing which we see, or suppose we see) presupposes the existence of light somewhere, and is itself light, only in an enfeebled or reflected condition. Only, most people in our, not so much enlightened as enlightening times, are like nocturnal insects who avoid, or are pained by, the light of day, but, in the night, fly to every nocturnal light, every phosphorescent surface.

The graves of the best men are like those of the Moravians, level and flat, and this earthly sphere of ours is a Westminster Abbey of such levellings and flattenings—ah! what innumerable drops of tears as well as blood (which are what the three grand trees of this world—the trees of Life, of Knowledge, and Liberty—are watered with) have been shed, but never counted. History, in painting the human race, does not follow the example of that painter who, making a portrait of a one-eyed king, drew only his seeing profile; what history paints is the blind side, and it needs some grand calamity to bring great men to light—as comets are seen during total eclipses of the sun. Not upon the battle-field only—upon the holy ground of virtue also, and upon the classic soil of truth—the pedestal whereon history raises on high some single hero whose name rings in all men’s ears has to be composed and built up of thousands of other heroes who have fought and fallen, nameless and unknown. The noblest deeds of heroism are done within four walls, not before the public gaze,—and as history keeps record only of the men sacrificed, and, on the whole, writes only in spilt blood, doubtless our annals are grander and more beautiful in the eyes of the all-pervading spirit of the universe than in those of the history-writer; the great scenes of history are estimated according to the numbers of angels or devils on the stage, the men not being taken into account.