Eiled round with words of power, The '_Author's Mind_,' in all its
hallowed riches, Stands a cathedral: full of precious things; Tastefully
built in harmonies unbroken, Cloister, and aisle, dark crypt, and aery
tower: Long-treasured relics in the fretted niches, And secret stores,
and heap'd-up offerings, Art's noblest gems, with every fruit and
flower, Paintings and sculpture, choice imaginings, Its plenitude of
wealth and praise betoken: An ever-burning lamp portrays the soul; Deep
music all around enchantment flings; And God's great Presence
consecrates the whole. Now at length, in all verity, I have said out my
say: nor publisher nor printer shall get more copy from me: neither,
indeed, would it before have been the case, for all that Damastic
argument, were it not that many beginnings--and you remember my
proverbial preliminarizing--should, for mere antithesis' sake, be
endowed with a counterpoise of many endings. So, in this second parting,
let me humbly suggest to gentle reader these: that nothing is at once
more plebeian and unphilosophical than--censure, in a world where
nothing can be perfect, and where apathy is held to be good-breeding;
_item_, (I am quoting Scott,) that "it is much more easy to destroy than
to build, to criticise than to compose;" _item_, (Sir Walter again,
_ipsissima verba_, in a letter to Miss Seward,) that there are certain
literary "gentlemen who appear to be a sort of tinkers, who, unable to
_make_ pots and pans, set up for _menders_ of them, and often make two
holes in patching one;" _item_, that in such possible cases as
"exercise" for "exorcise," "repeat" for "repent," "depreciate" for
"deprecate," and the like, an indifferent scribe is always at the mercy
of compositors; and lastly, that if it is, by very far, easier to read a
book than to write one, it is also, by at least as much, worthier of a
noble mind to give credit for good intentions, rather than for bad, or
indifferent, or none at all, even where hyper-criticism may appear to
prove that the effort itself has been a failure.
