same interest will be found, perhaps, to rekindle at a maturer age,
when the characteristic features of the individual mind have been
unfolded. And I contend that much more than amusement ought to settle
upon any narrative of a life that is really _confidential_. It is
singular--but many of my readers will know it for a truth--that vast
numbers of people, though liberated from all reasonable motives to
self-restraint, _cannot_ be confidential--have it not in their power
to lay aside reserve; and many, again, cannot be so with particular
people. I have witnessed more than once the case, that a young female
dancer, at a certain turn of a peculiar dance, could not--though she
had died for it--sustain a free, fluent motion. Aerial chains fell
upon her at one point; some invisible spell (who could say _what_?)
froze her elasticity. Even as a horse, at noonday on an open heath,
starts aside from something his rider cannot see; or as the flame
within a Davy lamp feeds upon the poisonous gas up to the meshes that
surround it, but there suddenly is arrested by barriers that no Aladdin
will ever dislodge. It is because a man cannot see and measure these
mystical forces which palsy him, that he cannot deal with them
effectually. If he were able really to pierce the haze which so often
envelops, even to himself, his own secret springs of action and reserve,
there cannot be a life moving at all under intellectual impulses that
would not, through that single force of absolute frankness, fall within
the reach of a deep, solemn, and sometimes even of a thrilling interest.
Without pretending to an interest of this quality, I have done what
was possible on _my_ part towards the readiest access to such an
interest by perfect sincerity--saying every where nothing _but_ the
truth; and in any case forbearing to say the _whole_ truth only through
consideration for others.

Into the second class I throw those papers which address themselves