aged friend of five-and-twenty, or thereabouts, pause at the
threshold of this particular record, and ask yourself seriously whether
you are fit to read such revelations as are to follow. For observe, you
have here no splendid array of petals such as poets offer you,--nothing
but a dry shell, containing, if you will get out what is in it, a few
small seeds of poems. You may laugh at them, if you like. I shall never
tell you what I think of you for so doing. But if you can read into the
heart of these things, in the light of other memories as slight, yet as
dear to your soul, then you are neither more nor less than a POET, and can
afford to write no more verses during the rest of your natural life,--
which abstinence I take to be one of the surest marks of your meriting the
divine name I have just bestowed upon you.

[May I beg of you who have begun this paper, nobly trusting to your own
imagination and sensibilities to give it the significance which it does
not lay claim to without your kind assistance,--may I beg of you, I say,
to pay particular attention to the _brackets_ which enclose certain
paragraphs? I want my "asides," you see, to whisper loud to you who read
my notes, and sometimes I talk a page or two to you without pretending
that I said a word of it to our boarders. You will find a very long
"aside" to you almost as soon as you begin to read. And so, dear young
friend, fall to at once, taking such things as I have provided for you;
and if you turn them, by the aid of your powerful imagination, into a fair
banquet, why, then, peace be with you, and a summer by the still waters of
some quiet river, or by some yellow beach, where, as my friend, the
Professor, says, you can sit with Nature's wrist in your hand and count
her ocean-pulses.]

I should like to make a few intimate revelations relating especially to my
early life, if I thought you would like to hear them.

[The schoolmistress turned a little in
her chair, and sat with her face directed partly towards me.--Half-
mourning now;--purple ribbon. That breastpin she wears has _gray_ hair in
it; her mother's, no doubt;--I remember our landlady's daughter telling
me, soon after the school-mistress came to board with us, that she had
lately "buried a payrent." That's what made her look so pale,--kept the
poor sick thing alive with her own blood. Ah! long illness is the real
vampyrism; think of living a year or two after one is dead, by sucking the
life-blood