You will read perhaps with smiles: you will possibly praise the ingenuity: you will talk, with a lip schooled against the slightest quiver, of some bit of pathos, and say that it is—well done. Yet why is it well done? —only because it is stolen from your very life and heart. It is good, because it is so common:—ingenious, because it is so honest:—well-conceived, because it is not conceived at all.
There are thousands of mole-eyed people, who count all passion in print—a lie:—people who will grow into a rag eat trifles, and weep in the dark, and love in secret, and hope without mention, and cover it all under the cloak of what they call—propriety. I can see before me now some gray-haired old gentleman, very money-getting, very correct, very cleanly, who reads the morning paper with unction, and his Bible with determination: who listens to dull sermons with patience, and who prays with quiet self-applause,—and yet there are moments belonging to his life, when his curdled affections eae for something that they have not, when his avarice oversteps all the commandments,—when his pride builds castles full of splendor; and yet put this before his eye, and he reads with the most careless air in the world, and condemns as arrant fiction, what cannot be proved to the elders.
