INSCRIPTION FOR A LITTLE BOOK ON GIORDANO BRUNO
As America's mental courage (the thought comes to me to-day) is so
indebted, above all current lands and peoples, to the noble army
of Old-World martyrs past, how incumbent on us that we clear those
martyrs' lives and names, and hold them up for reverent admiration,
as well as beacons. And typical of this, and standing for it and all
perhaps, Giordano Bruno may well be put, to-day and to come, in our
New World's thankfulest heart and memory.
W.W. CAMDEN, NEW JERSEY, _February 24th, 1890_.
SPLINTERS
While I stand in reverence before the fact of Humanity, the People, I
will confess, in writing my L. of G., the least consideration out of
all that has had to do with it has been the consideration of "the
public"--at any rate as it now exists. Strange as it may sound for
a democrat to say so, I am clear that no free and original and
lofty-soaring poem, or one ambitious of those achievements, can
possibly be fulfill'd by any writer who has largely in his thought
_the public_--or the question, What will establish'd literature--What
will the current authorities say about it?
As far as I have sought any, not the best laid out garden or parterre
has been my model--but Nature has been. I know that in a sense the
garden is nature too, but I had to choose--I could not give both.
Besides the gardens are well represented in poetry; while Nature (in
letter and in spirit, in the divine essence,) little if at all.
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