my _role_--such a mind is not a sheet of
smooth wax, but a magic stone indented with fluttering inscriptions; no
empty tenement, but a barn stored to bursting: it is a painful pressure,
constraining to write for comfort's sake; an appetite craving to be
satisfied, as well as a power to be exerted; an impetus that longs to
get away, rather than a dormant dynamic: thrice have I (let me confess
it) poured forth the alleviating volume as an author, a real
author--real, because for very peace of mind, involuntarily; but still
the vessel fills; still the indigenous crop springs up, choking a better
harvest, seeds of foreign growth; still those Lernaean necks sprout
again, claiming with many mouths to explain, amuse, suggest, and
controvert--to publish invention, and proscribe error. Truly, it were
enviable to be less apprehensive, less retentive; to be fitted with a
colander-mind, like that penal cask which forty-nine Danaides might not
keep from leaking; to be, sometimes at least, suffered for a holiday to
ramble brainless in the paradise of fools. Memory, imagination, zeal,
perceptions of men and things, equally with rank and riches, have often
cost their full price, as many mad have known; they take too much out of
a man--fret, wear, worry him; to be irritable, is the conditional tax
laid of old upon an author's intellect; the crowd of internal imagery
makes him hasty, quick, nervous as a haunted hunted man: minds of
coarser web heed not how small a thorn rends one of so delicate a
texture; they cannot estimate the wish that a duller sword were in a
tougher scabbard; the river, not content with channel and restraining
banks, overflows perpetually; the extortionate exacting armies of the
Ideal and the Causal persecute MY spirit, and I would make a
patriot stand at once to vanquish the invaders of my peace: I write
these things only to be quit of them, and not to let the crowd increase;
I have conceived a plan to destroy them all, as Jehu and Elijah with the
priests of Baal; I feel Malthusian among my mental nurselings; a dire
resolve has filled me to effect a premature destruction of the literary
populace superfoetating in my brain--plays, novels, essays, tales,
homilies, and rhythmicals; for ethics and poetics, politics and
rhetorics, will I display no more mercy than sundry commentators of
maltreated Aristotle: I will exhibit them in their state chaotic; I will
addle the eggs, and the chicken shall not chirp; I will reveal