e as dear as the haunts by the sunny
peach-wall. But what shall replace to thee the bright dream of thine
innocent ambition,--that angel-wing which had glittered across thy
manhood, in the hour between its noon and its setting What replace to
thee the Magnum Opus--the Great Book!--fair and broad-spreading tree,
lone amidst the sameness of the landscape, now plucked up by the roots?
The oxygen was subtracted from the air of thy life. For be it known
to you, O my compassionate readers, that with the death of the
Anti-Publisher Society the blood-streams of the Great Book stood still,
its pulse was arrested, its full heart beat no more. Three thousand
copies of the first seven sheets in quarto, with sundry unfinished
plates, anatomical, architectural, and graphic, depicting various
developments of the human skull (that temple of Human Error), from the
Hottentot to the Greek; sketches of ancient buildings, Cyclopean and
Pelasgic; Pyramids and Pur-tors, all signs of races whose handwriting
was on their walls; landscapes to display the influence of Nature upon
the customs, creeds, and philosophy of men,--here showing how the broad
Chaldean wastes led to the contemplation of the stars; and illustrations
of the Zodiac, in elucidation of the mysteries of symbol-worship;
fantastic vagaries of earth fresh from the Deluge, tending to impress on
early superstition the awful sense of the rude powers of Nature; views
of the rocky defiles of Laconia,--Sparta, neighbored by the "silent
Amyclae," explaining, as it were, geographically the iron customs of
the warrior colony (arch-Tories, amidst the shift and roar of Hellenic
democracies), contrasted by the seas and coasts and creeks of Athens and
Ionia, tempting to adventure, commerce, and change. Yea, my father, in
his suggestions to the artist of those few imperfect plates, had thrown
as much light on the infancy of earth and its tribes as by the "shining
words" that flowed from his calm, starry knowledge! Plates and copies,
all rested now in peace and dust, "housed with darkness and with
death," on the sepulchral shelves of the lobby to which they were
consigned,--rays intercepted, world incompleted. The Prometheus was
bound, and the fire he had stolen from heaven lay imbedded in the flints
of his rock. For so costly was the mould in which Uncle Jack and the
Anti-Publisher Society had contrived to cast this exposition of Human
Error that every bookseller shied at its very sight, as an owl