maton
artists, MAN IS A WRITING ANIMAL.

Wearily enough, you will think, have we disposed of this one definition:
but recollect, and take me for a son of leisure, an amateur tourist of
Parnassus, an idling gatherer of way-side flowers in the vale of
Thessaly, a careless, unbusied, "contemplative man," recreating himself
by gentle craft on the banks of much-poached Helicon; and if you, my
casual friend, be neither like-minded in fancy nor like-fitted in
leisure, courteously consider that we may not travel well together: at
this station let us stop, freely forgiving each other for mutual
misliking; to your books, to your business, to your fowling, to your
feasting, to your mummery, to your nunnery--go: my track lays away from
the highroad, in and out between yonder hills, among thickets, mossy
rocks, green hollows, high fern, and the tangled hair of hiding
river-gods; I meet not pedlers and bagsmen, but stumble upon fawns just
dropped, and do not scare their doting mothers; I quench not my noonday
thirst with fiery drams from a brazen tap, but, lying over the cold
brook, drink to its musical Naiades; I walk no dusty roads of a
working-day world, but flit upon the pleasant places of one made up of
holidays.

A truce to this truancy, and method be my maxim: let us for a moment
link our reasonings, and solder one stray rivet; man being a writing
animal, there still remains the question, what is writing? Ah, there's
the rub: a very comfortable definition would it be, if every pen-holder
and pen-wiper could truly claim that kingship of the universe--that
imagery of his Maker--that mystical, marvellous, immortal, intellectual,
abstraction, manhood: but, what then is WRITING? Ye tons of
invoices, groaning shelves of incalculable legers, parchment abhorrences
of rare Charles Lamb, we think not now of you; dreary piles of
unhealthy-looking law-books, hypochondriacal heaps of medical
experiences, plodding folios of industrious polemics, slow elaborations
of learned dullness, we spare your native dust; letters unnumbered, in
all stages of cacography, both physical and metaphysical, alack! most of
you must slip through the meshes of our definition yet unwove; poor
deciduous leaves of the forest, that, at your best, serve only--it is
yet a good purpose--to dress the common soil of human kindness, without
attaining to the praise of wreaths and chaplets ever hanging in the
Muses' temple; flowers withered on the stalk, whose blooming b