his limbs are
of a sort to make him shambling on land. The act of writing, in spite of
past experience, brings with it the vague, delightful illusion of an
audience nearer to my idiom than the Cherokees, and more numerous than
the visionary One for whom many authors have declared themselves willing
to go through the pleasing punishment of publication. My illusion is of
a more liberal kind, and I imagine a far-off, hazy, multitudinous
assemblage, as in a picture of Paradise, making an approving chorus to
the sentences and paragraphs of which I myself particularly enjoy the
writing. The haze is a necessary condition. If any physiognomy becomes
distinct in the foreground, it is fatal. The countenance is sure to be
one bent on discountenancing my innocent intentions: it is pale-eyed,
incapable of being amused when I am amused or indignant at what makes me
indignant; it stares at my presumption, pities my ignorance, or is
manifestly preparing to expose the various instances in which I
unconsciously disgrace myself. I shudder at this too corporeal auditor,
and turn towards another point of the compass where the haze is
unbroken. Why should I not indulge this remaining illusion, since I do
not take my approving choral paradise as a warrant for setting the press
to work again and making some thousand sheets of superior paper
unsaleable? I leave my manuscripts to a judgment outside my imagination,
but I will not ask to hear it, or request my friend to pronounce, before
I have been buried decently, what he really thinks of my parts, and to
state candidly whether my papers would be most usefully applied in
lighting the cheerful domestic fire. It is too probable that he will be
exasperated at the trouble I have given him of reading them; but the
consequent clearness and vivacity with which he could demonstrate to me
that the fault of my manuscripts, as of my one published work, is simply
flatness, and not that surpassing subtilty which is the preferable
ground of popular neglect--this verdict, however instructively
expressed, is a portion of earthly discipline of which I will not
beseech my friend to be the instrument. Other persons, I am aware, have
not the same cowardly shrinking from a candid opinion of their
performances, and are even importunately eager for it; but I have
convinced myself in numerous cases that such exposers of their own back
to the smiter were of too hopeful a disposition to believe in the
scourge, and really