I wish I could convey
to the reader the associations that attach to these soil'd and creas'd
livraisons, each composed of a sheet or two of paper, folded small to
carry in the pocket, and fasten'd with a pin. I leave them just as I
threw them by after the war, blotch'd here and there with more than one
blood-stain, hurriedly written, sometimes at the clinique, not seldom
amid the excitement of uncertainty, or defeat, or of action, or getting
ready for it, or a march. Most of the pages from 20 to 75 are verbatim
copies of those lurid and blood-smuch'd little notebooks.
Very different are most of the memoranda that follow. Some time after
the war ended I had a paralytic stroke, which prostrated me for
several years. In 1876 I began to get over the worst of it. From this
date, portions of several seasons, especially summers, I spent at a
secluded haunt down in Camden county, New Jersey--Timber creek, quite
a little river (it enters from the great Delaware, twelve miles
away)--with primitive solitudes, winding stream, recluse and woody
banks, sweet-feeding springs, and all the charms that birds, grass,
wild-flowers, rabbits and squirrels, old oaks, walnut trees, &c., can
bring. Through these times, and on these spots, the diary from page 76
onward was mostly written.
The COLLECT afterwards gathers up the odds and ends of whatever pieces
I can now lay hands on, written at various times past, and swoops all
together like fish in a net.
I suppose I publish and leave the whole gathering, first, from that
eternal tendency to perpetuate and preserve which is behind all
Nature, authors included; second, to symbolize two or three specimen
interiors, personal and other, out of the myriads of my time, the
middle range of the Nineteenth century in the New World; a strange,
unloosen'd, wondrous time.
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