remely onerous, and is soon going to be
impossible, for me to keep up the wide range of correspondence which has
become a large part of my occupation, and tends to absorb all the vital
force which is left me, I wish to enter into a final explanation with the
well-meaning but merciless taskmasters who have now for many years been
levying their daily tax upon me. I have preserved thousands of their
letters, and destroyed a very large number, after answering most of them.
A few interesting chapters might be made out of the letters I have
kept,--not only such as are signed by the names of well-known personages,
but many from unknown friends, of whom I had never heard before and have
never heard since. A great deal of the best writing the languages of the
world have ever known has been committed to leaves that withered out of
sight before a second sunlight had fallen upon them. I have had many
letters I should have liked to give the public, had their nature admitted
of their being offered to the world. What straggles of young ambition,
finding no place for its energies, or feeling its incapacity to reach the
ideal towards which it was striving! What longings of disappointed,
defeated fellow-mortals, trying to find a new home for themselves in the
heart of one whom they have amiably idealized! And oh, what hopeless
efforts of mediocrities and inferiorities, believing in themselves as
superiorities, and stumbling on through limping disappointments to
prostrate failure! Poverty comes pleading, not for charity, for the most
part, but imploring us to find a purchaser for its unmarketable wares.
The unreadable author particularly requests us to make a critical
examination of his book, and report to him whatever may be our
verdict,--as if he wanted anything but our praise, and that very often to
be used in his publisher's advertisements.

But what does not one have to submit to who has become the martyr--the
Saint Sebastian--of a literary correspondence! I will not dwell on the
possible impression produced on a sensitive nature by reading one's own
premature obituary, as I have told you has been my recent experience. I
will not stop to think whether the urgent request for an autograph by
return post, in view of the possible contingencies which might render it
the last one was ever to write, is pleasing or not. At threescore and
twenty one must expect such hints of what is like to happen before long.
I suppose, if some near friend we