r, that I never have offered and never intend to offer
any history whatever of my personal experience, social, literary, or
emotional, to the readers of any magazine, newspaper, novel, or
correspondence whatever. Nor is there any one human being who has ever
heard or ever will hear the whole of that experience,--no, not even
Dunderhed Van Nudel, Esquire, should he buy me to-morrow!

Also, I wish to relieve the minds of many friendly readers, who, hearing
and believing these reports, bestow upon me a vast amount of sympathy
that is worthy of a better fate. My dear friends, as I said before, it
is principally toothache; poetry is next best to clove-oil, and less
injurious to the enamel. I beg of you not to suppose that every poet who
howls audibly in the anguish of his soul is really afflicted in the said
soul; but one must have respect for the dignity of High Art. Answer me
now with frankness, what should you think of a poem that ran in this
style?--

"The sunset's gorgeous wonder
Flashes and fades away;
But my back-tooth aches like thunder,
And I cannot now be gay!"

Now just see how affecting it is, when you "change the venue," as
lawyers say:--

"The sunset's gorgeous wonder
Flashes and fades away;
But I hear the muttering thunder,
And my sad heart dies like the day."

I leave it to any candid mind, what would be the result to literature,
if such a course were pursued?

Besides, look at the facts in the case. You read the most tearful
strains of the most melancholy poet you know; if you took them
_verbatim_, you would expect him to be found by the printer's-boy, sent
for copy, "by starlight on the north side of a tombstone," as Dr.
Bellamy said, enjoying a northeaster without any umbrella, and soaking
the ground with tears, unwittingly antiseptic, in fact, as Mr. Mantalini
expressed himself, "a damp, moist, unpleasant body." But where, I ask,
does that imp find the aforesaid poet, when he goes to get the seventh
stanza of the "Lonely Heart"? Why, in the gentlemen's parlor of a
first-class hotel, his feet tilted up in the window, his apparel
perfectly dry and shiny with various ornamental articles appended, his
eyes half open over a daily paper, his parted lips clinging to a cigar,
his whole aspect well-to-do and comfortable. And aren't you glad of it?
I am; there is so much real misery in the world, that don't know how to
write for the papers, and has to have its tooth