class of compositions included in the American collection, I rank _The
Confessions of an Opium Eater_, and also (but more emphatically) the
_Suspiria de Profundis_. On these, as modes of impassioned prose ranging
under no precedents that I am aware of in any literature, it is much
more difficult to speak justly, whether in a hostile or a friendly
character. As yet, neither of these two works has ever received the
least degree of that correction and pruning which both require so
extensively; and of the _Suspiria_, not more than perhaps one third
has yet been printed. When both have been fully revised, I shall feel
myself entitled to ask for a more determinate adjudication on their
claims as works of art. At present, I feel authorized to make haughtier
pretensions in right of their _conception_ than I shall venture to do,
under the peril of being supposed to characterize their _execution_.
Two remarks only I shall address to the equity of my reader. First, I
desire to remind him of the perilous difficulty besieging all attempts
to clothe in words the visionary scenes derived from the world of
dreams, where a single false note, a single word in a wrong key, ruins
the whole music; and, secondly, I desire him to consider the utter
sterility of universal literature in this one department of impassioned
prose; which certainly argues some singular difficulty suggesting a
singular duty of indulgence in criticizing any attempt that even
imperfectly succeeds. The sole Confessions, belonging to past times,
that have at all succeeded in engaging the attention of men, are those
of St. Augustine and of Rousseau. The very idea of breathing a record
of human passion, not into the ear of the random crowd, but of the
saintly confessional, argues an impassioned theme. Impassioned,
therefore, should be the tenor of the composition. Now, in St.
Augustine's Confessions is found one most impassioned passage, viz.,
the lamentation for the death of his youthful friend in the fourth
book; one, and no more. Further there is nothing. In Rousseau there