No More Learning

The Public will see by a glance
at this schedule, that they cannot expect me to be over-sedulous about
courting _them_, since it seems I have got enough fuel made sure of
for boiling my pot.

As for such of our poets as find not their names mentioned once in my
pages, with praises or blames, let them SEND IN THEIR CARDS, without
further DELAY, to my friend G. P. PUTNAM, Esquire, in Broadway, where a
LIST will be kept with the strictest regard to the day and the hour of
receiving the card. Then, taking them up as I chance to have time (that
is, if their names can be twisted in rhyme), I will honestly give each
his PROPER POSITION, at the rate of ONE AUTHOR to each NEW EDITION. Thus
a PREMIUM is offered sufficiently HIGH (as the magazines say when they
tell their best lie) to induce bards to CLUB their resources and buy the
balance of every edition, until they have all of them fairly been run
through the mill.

One word to such readers (judicious and wise) as read books with
something behind the mere eyes, of whom in the country, perhaps, there
are two, including myself, gentle reader, and you. All the characters
sketched in this slight _jeu d'esprit_, though, it may be, they seem,
here and there, rather free, and drawn from a somewhat too cynical
standpoint, are _meant_ to be faithful, for that is the grand point,
and none but an owl would feel sore at a rub from a jester who tells you,
without any subterfuge, that he sits in Diogenes' tub.



A PRELIMINARY NOTE TO THE SECOND EDITION.

Though it well may be reckoned, of all composition, the species at once
most delightful and healthy, is a thing which an author, unless he be
wealthy and willing to pay for that kind of delight, is not, in all
instances, called on to write, though there are, it is said, who, their
spirits to cheer, slip in a new title-page three times a year, and in
this way snuff up an imaginary savor of that sweetest of dishes, the
popular favor,--much as if a starved painter should fall to and treat
the Ugolino inside to a picture of meat.

You remember (if not, pray turn, backward and look) that, in writing the
preface which ushered my book, I treated you, excellent Public, not
merely with a cool disregard, but downright cavalierly. Now I would not
take back the least thing I then said, though I thereby could butter
both sides of my bread, for I never could see that an author owed aught
to the people he solaced, diverted, or taught; and, as for mere fame, I
have long ago learned that the persons by whom it is finally earned are
those with whom _your_ verdict weighed not a pin, unsustained by the
higher court sitting within.

But I wander from what I intended to say,--that you have, namely, shown
such a liberal way of thinking, and so much aesthetic perception of
anonymous worth in the handsome reception you gave to my book, spite of
some private piques (having bought the first thousand in barely two
weeks), that I think, past a doubt, if you measured the phiz of yours
most devotedly, Wonderful Quiz, you would find that its vertical section
was shorter, by an inch and two tenths, or 'twixt that and a quarter.

You have watched a child playing--in those wondrous years when belief is
not bound to the eyes and the ears, and the vision divine is so clear
and unmarred, that each baker of pies in the dirt is a bard? Give a
knife and a shingle, he fits out a fleet, and, on that little mud-puddle
over the street, his fancy, in purest good faith, will make sail round
the globe with a puff of his breath for a gale, will visit, in barely
ten minutes, all climes, and do the Columbus-feat hundreds of times.
Or,
suppose the young poet fresh stored with delights from that Bible of
childhood, the Arabian Nights, he will turn to a crony and cry, 'Jack,
let's play that I am a Genius! ' Jacky straightway makes Aladdin's lamp
out of a stone, and, for hours, they enjoy each his own supernatural
powers. This is all very pretty and pleasant, but then suppose our two
urchins, have grown into men, and both have turned authors,--one says to
his brother, 'Let's play we're the American somethings or other,--say
Homer or Sophocles, Goethe or Scott (only let them be big enough, no
matter what). Come, you shall be Byron or Pope, which you choose: I'll
be Coleridge, and both shall write mutual reviews. ' So they both (as
mere strangers) before many days send each other a cord of anonymous
bays. Each piling his epithets, smiles in his sleeve to see what his
friend can be made to believe; each, reading the other's unbiased
review, thinks--Here's pretty high praise, but no more than my due.
Well, we laugh at them both, and yet make no great fuss when the same
farce is acted to benefit us. Even I, who, it asked, scarce a month
since, what Fudge meant, should have answered, the dear Public's
critical judgment, begin to think sharp-witted Horace spoke sooth when
he said that the Public _sometimes_ hit the truth.

In reading these lines, you perhaps have a vision of a person in pretty
good health and condition; and yet, since I put forth my primary
edition, I have been crushed, scorched, withered, used up and put down
(by Smith with the cordial assistance of Brown), in all, if you put any
faith in my rhymes, to the number of ninety-five several times, and,
while I am writing,--I tremble to think of it, for I may at this moment
be just on the brink of it,--Molybdostom, angry at being omitted, has
begun a critique,--am I not to be pitied? [1]

Now I shall not crush _them_ since, indeed, for that matter, no pressure
I know of could render them flatter; nor wither, nor scorch them,--no
action of fire could make either them or their articles drier; nor waste
time in putting them down--I am thinking not their own self-inflation
will keep them from sinking; for there's this contradiction about the
whole bevy,--though without the least weight, they are awfully heavy.
No, my dear honest bore, _surdo fabulam narras_, they are no more to me
than a rat in the arras. I can walk with the Doctor, get facts from the
Don, or draw out the Lambish quintessence of John, and feel nothing more
than a half-comic sorrow, to think that they all will be lying to-morrow
tossed carelessly up on the waste-paper shelves, and forgotten by all
but their half-dozen selves. Once snug in my attic, my fire in a roar, I
leave the whole pack of them outside the door. With Hakluyt or Purchas I
wander away to the black northern seas or barbaric Cathay; get _fou_
with O'Shanter, and sober me then with that builder of brick-kilnish
dramas, rare Ben; snuff Herbert, as holy as a flower on a grave; with
Fletcher wax tender, o'er Chapman grow brave; with Marlowe or Kyd take a
fine poet-rave; in Very, most Hebrew of Saxons, find peace; with Lycidas
welter on vext Irish seas; with Webster grow wild, and climb earthward
again, down by mystical Browne's Jacob's-ladder-like brain, to that
spiritual Pepys (Cotton's version) Montaigne; find a new depth in
Wordsworth, undreamed of before, that marvel, a poet divine who can
bore. Or, out of my study, the scholar thrown off, Nature holds up her
shield 'gainst the sneer and the scoff; the landscape, forever consoling
and kind, pours her wine and her oil on the smarts of the mind. The
waterfall, scattering its vanishing gems; the tall grove of hemlocks,
with moss on their stems, like plashes of sunlight; the pond in the
woods, where no foot but mine and the bittern's intrudes, where
pitcher-plants purple and gentians hard by recall to September the blue
of June's sky; these are all my kind neighbors, and leave me no wish to
say aught to you all, my poor critics, but--pish!