minaries being settled, though I fear little to the
satisfaction of either party concerned, let us proceed--further to
preliminarize; for you will find, even to the end, as you may have found
out already from the beginning, that your white knight is mounted rather
on an ambling preambling palfrey, than on any determinate charger;
curveting and prancing, and rambling and scrambling at his own unmanaged
will: scorning the bit and bridle, too hot to bear the spur, careless of
listing laws, and wishing rather playfully to show his paces, than to
tilt against a foe.

An author's mind, _qua_ author, is essentially a gossip; an oral,
ocular, imaginative, common-place book: a _pot pourri_ mixed from the
_hortus siccus_ of education, and the greener garden of internal thought
that springs in fresh verdure about the heart's own fountain; a compound
of many metals flowing from the mental crucible as one--perchance a base
alloy, perchance new, and precious, and beautiful as the fine brass of
Corinth; an accidental meeting in the same small chamber of many
spiritual essences that combine, as by magnetism into some strange and
novel substance; a mixture of appropriations, made lawfully a man's own
by labour spent upon the raw material; corn-clad Egypt rescued from a
burnt Africa by the richness of a swelling Nile--the black forest of
pines changed into a laughing vineyard by skill, enterprise, and
culture--the mechanism of Frankenstein's man of clay, energized at
length by the spark Promethean.

And now, reader, do you begin to comprehend me, and my title? '_An
Author's Mind_' is first in the field, and, as with root and fruit, must
take precedence of its booklets; bear then, if you will, with this
desultory anatomization of itself yet a little longer, and then in good
time and moderate space you will come to the rudiments--bones, so to
speak--of its many members, the frame-work on which its nerves and
muscles hang, the names of its unborn children, the title-pages of its
own unprinted books.

Philosophers and fools, separately or together, as the case may be--for
folly and philosophy not seldom form one Janus-head, and Minerva's bird
seems sometimes not ill-fitted with the face of Momus--these and their
thousand intermediates have tried in all ages to define that quaint
enigma, Man: and I wot not that any pundit of literature hath better
succeeded than the nameless, fameless man--or woman, was it?--or haply
some innocent shrewd c