up, a right happy, capital,
and noble-minded thesis, no other than

HOME.

Alas, for the epidemy to which, few can doubt, ideas are subject! Alas,
for the conflict of prolific geniuses, wherewith the world's quiet is
disturbed! not impossibly, this very book now in progress of inditing
will come to be classed as a "Patch-work," an "Olla Podrida," a "Book
without a name," or some other such like _rechauffee_ publication;
whereas I protest its idea to be exclusively mine own, and conceived
long before its seeming congeners saw the light in definite
advertisements--at least to my beholding. And similarly went it with my
poor epic: scarcely had a general plan suggested itself to my musings,
and divers particular morsels thereof assumed "their unpremeditative
lay;" scarcely had I jotted down a staid synopsis, and a goodly array of
metrical specimens; when some intrusive newspaper displayed to me in
black and white a good-natured notice of somebody else's '_Home, an
Epic_.' So, as in the case of '_Nero_,' and haply of other subjects, had
it come to pass, that my high-mettled racer had made another false
start; that my just-discovered island, so gladly to have been
self-appropriated, was found to have, sticking on one corner of it, the
flag of another king; that the havoc of my brain, subsiding calmly into
the pendulum regularities of metre, was much ado about nothing; and all
those pretty fancies were the catalogued property of another. Such a
subject, too! intrinsically worthy of a niche in the temple of Fame,
besides Hope, Memory, and Imagination, _if_ only one could manage it
well enough to be named in the same breath with Campbell, Rogers, and
Akenside. Well, it was a mental mortification; for I am full of moral
land-marks, and would not (poetically speaking) for the world move
rooted termini into other people's grounds. Whether the field has been
well or ill preoccupied I wot not, having neither seen the poem nor
heard its maker's name: therefore shall my charity hope well of it, and
mourn over the unmerited oblivion which generally greets modern
poetry--yea, upon its very natal-day. Nevertheless, as an upright man
will never wish barefacedly to steal from others, so does he determine
at all times to claim independently his own: to be robbed, and not
resent it (I speak foolishly), is the next mean thing after pilfering
itself; and rash will be thy daring, O literary larcener! (can such
things be?) if thou art found u