fer you,--nothing but a dry shell, containing, if
you will get out what is in it, a few small seeds of poems. You
may laugh at them, if you like. I shall never tell you what I
think of you for so doing. But if you can read into the heart of
these things, in the light of other memories as slight, yet as dear
to your soul, then you are neither more nor less than a POET, and
can afford to write no more verses during the rest of your natural
life,--which abstinence I take to be one of the surest marks of
your meriting the divine name I have just bestowed upon you.

May I beg of you who have begun this paper nobly trusting to your
own imagination and sensibilities to give it the significance which
it does not lay claim to without your kind assistance,--may I beg
of you, I say, to pay particular attention to the BRACKETS which
enclose certain paragraphs? I want my "asides," you see, to
whisper loud to you who read my notes, and sometimes I talk a page
or two to you without pretending that I said a word of it to our
boarders. You will find a very long "aside" to you almost as soon
as you begin to read. And so, dear young friend, fall to at once,
taking such things as I have provided for you; and if you turn
them, by the aid of your powerful imagination, into a fair banquet,
why, then, peace be with you, and a summer by the still waters of
some quiet river, or by some yellow beach, where, as my friend the
Professor, says, you can sit with Nature's wrist in your hand and
count her ocean-pulses.]

I should like to make a few intimate revelations relating
especially to my early life, if I thought you would like to hear
them.

[The schoolmistress turned a little in her chair, and sat with her
face directed partly towards me.--Half-mourning now;--purple
ribbon. That breastpin she wears has GRAY hair in it; her
mother's, no doubt;--I remember our landlady's daughter telling me,
soon after the schoolmistress came to board with us, that she had
lately "buried a payrent." That's what made her look so pale,
--kept the poor dying thing alive with her own blood. Ah! long
illness is the real vampyrism; think of living a year or two after
one is dead, by sucking the life-blood out of a frail young
creature at one's bedside! Well, souls grow white, as well as
cheeks, in these holy duties one that goes in a nurse may come out
an angel.--God bless all good women!--to their soft hands and
pitying hearts we must all come at last!--