known since it had passed out of the brief, burning cycle of the
passions! Lost was the home endeared to thee by so many noiseless
victories of the mind, so many mute histories of the heart; for only the
scholar knoweth how deep a charm lies in monotony, in the old
associations, the old ways and habitual clockwork of peaceful time. Yet
the home may be replaced,--thy heart built its home round itself
everywhere,--and the old Tower might supply the loss of the brick house,
and the walk by the stewpond become as dear as the haunts by the sunny
peach-wall. But what shall replace to thee the bright dream of thine
innocent ambition,--that angel-wing which had glittered across thy
manhood, in the hour between its noon and its setting What replace to
thee the Magnum Opus--the Great Book!--fair and broad-spreading tree,
lone amidst the sameness of the landscape, now plucked up by the roots?
The oxygen was subtracted from the air of thy life. For be it known to
you, O my compassionate readers, that with the death of the Anti-
Publisher Society the blood-streams of the Great Book stood still, its
pulse was arrested, its full heart beat no more. Three thousand copies
of the first seven sheets in quarto, with sundry unfinished plates,
anatomical, architectural, and graphic, depicting various developments
of the human skull (that temple of Human Error), from the Hottentot to
the Greek; sketches of ancient buildings, Cyclopean and Pelasgic;
Pyramids and Pur-tors, all signs of races whose handwriting was on their
walls; landscapes to display the influence of Nature upon the customs,
creeds, and philosophy of men,--here showing how the broad Chaldean
wastes led to the contemplation of the stars; and illustrations of the
Zodiac, in elucidation of the mysteries of symbol-worship; fantastic
vagaries of earth fresh from the Deluge, tending to impress on early
superstition the awful sense of the rude powers of Nature; views of the
rocky defiles of Laconia,--Sparta, neighbored by the "silent Amyclae,"
explaining, as it were, geographically the iron customs of the warrior