ptation of his high and honourable calling, does good
by wholesale, irrigates countries, and gladdens largely the large heart
of human society. And are not these unbounded pleasures, spreading over
life, and comforting the struggles of a death-bed? Yes: rising as
Ezekiel's river from ankle to knee, from knee to girdle, from girdle to
the overflowing flood--far beyond those lowest joys, which many wise
have trampled under foot, of praise, and triumph, and profit--the
authorship of good, that has made men better; that has consoled sorrow,
advanced knowledge, humbled arrogance, and blest humanity; that has sent
the guilty to his prayers, and has gladdened the Christian in his
praises--the authorship of good, that has shown God in his loveliness,
and man in his dependence; that has aided the cause of charity, and
shamed the face of sin--this high beneficence, this boundless
good-doing, hath indeed a rich recompense, a glorious reward!

But we must speed on, and sear these hydra-necks, or we shall have as
many heads to our discourse, and as puzzling, as any treatise of the
Puritan divinity. Let us hasten to be practical; let us not so long
forget the promised title-pages; let it at length satisfy to show, more
than theoretically, how authorship stirs up the mind to daily-teeming
projects, and then casts out its half-made progeny; how scraps of paper
come to be covered with the cabala of half-written thoughts,
thenceforward doomed to suffer the dispersion-fate of Sibylline leaves;
how stores of mingled information gravitate into something of order,
each seed herding with its fellows; and how every atom of mixed metal,
educationally held in solution by the mind, is sought out by a keen
precipitating test, gregariously building up in time its own true
crystal.

Hereabouts, therefore, and hereafter, in as frank a fashion as
heretofore, artlessly, too, and, but for crowding fancies, briefly shall
follow a full and free confession of the embryo circulating library now
in the book-case of my brain; only premising, for the last of all last
times, that while I know it to be morally impossible that all should be
pleased herewith, I feel it to be intellectually improbable that any one
mind should equally be satisfied with each of the many parts of a
performance so various, inconsistent, and unusual; premising, also, that
wherein I may have stumbled upon other people's titles, it is
unwittingly and unwillingly; for the age breeds books