Certainly, (while I have not hit it by a long shot,) I have aim'd at
the most ambitious, the best--and sometimes feel to advance that aim
(even with all its arrogance) as the most redeeming part of my books.
I have never so much cared to feed the esthetic or intellectual
palates--but if I could arouse from its slumbers that eligibility
in every soul for its own true exercise! if I could only wield that
lever!
Out from the well-tended concrete and the physical--and in them and
from them only--radiate the spiritual and heroic.
Undoubtedly many points belonging to this essay--perhaps of the
greatest necessity, fitness and importance to it--have been left out
or forgotten. But the amount of the whole matter--poems, preface and
everything--is merely to make one of those little punctures or eyelets
the actors possess in the theatre-curtains to look out upon "the
house"--one brief, honest, living glance.
HEALTH, (OLD STYLE)
In that condition the whole body is elevated to a state by others
unknown--inwardly and outwardly illuminated, purified, made solid,
strong, yet buoyant. A singular charm, more than beauty, flickers out
of, and over, the face--a curious transparency beams in the eyes, both
in the iris and the white--the temper partakes also. Nothing
that happens--no event, rencontre, weather, &c--but it is
confronted--nothing but is subdued into sustenance--such is the
marvellous transformation from the old timorousness and the
old process of causes and effects.
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