What is not gather'd is far more--perhaps the main thing.
Grandest poetic passages are only to be taken at free removes, as we
sometimes look for stars at night, not by gazing directly toward them,
but off one side.
(_To a poetic student and friend._)--I only seek to put you in
rapport. Your own brain, heart, evolution, must not only understand
the matter, but largely supply it.
FINAL CONFESSIONS--LITERARY TESTS
So draw near their end these garrulous notes. There have doubtless
occurr'd some repetitions, technical errors in the consecutiveness of
dates, in the minutiae of botanical, astronomical, &c., exactness,
and perhaps elsewhere;--for in gathering up, writing, peremptorily
dispatching copy, this hot weather, (last of July and through August,
'82,) and delaying not the printers, I have had to hurry along, no
time to spare. But in the deepest veracity of all--in reflections of
objects, scenes, Nature's outpourings, to my senses and receptivity,
as they seem'd to me--in the work of giving those who care for it,
some authentic glints, specimen-days of my life--and in the _bona
fide_ spirit and relations, from author to reader, on all the subjects
design'd, and as far as they go, I feel to make unmitigated claims.
The synopsis of my early life, Long Island, New York city, and so
forth, and the diary-jottings in the Secession war, tell their own
story. My plan in starting what constitutes most of the middle of the
book, was originally for hints and data of a Nature-poem that should
carry one's experiences a few hours, commencing at noon-flush, and so
through the after-part of the day--I suppose led to such idea by my
own life-afternoon now arrived.
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