writing wild tales by day, most of which were burnt in his bachelor
fire, and some of which, in newspapers, magazines, and annuals, led a
wandering, uncertain, and mostly unnoticed life.

Those tales among this class which were attainable he collected into a
small volume, and apprizing the world that they were "twice-told",
sent them forth anew to make their own way, in the year 1841. But he
piped to the world, and it did not sing. He wept to it, and it did not
mourn. The book, however, as all good books do, made its way into
various hearts. Yet the few penetrant minds which recognized a
remarkable power and a method of strange fascination in the stories
did not make the public nor influence the public mind. "I was," he
says in the last edition of these tales, "the most unknown author in
America". Full of glancing wit, of tender satire, of exquisite natural
description, of subtle and strange analysis of human life, darkly
passionate and weird, they yet floated unhailed barks upon the sea of
publicity--unhailed, but laden and gleaming at every crevice with the
true treasure of Cathay. Bancroft, then Collector in Boston, prompt to
recognize and to honor talent, made the dreaming story-teller a
surveyor in the custom-house, thus opening to him a new range of
experience. From the society of phantoms he stepped upon Long Wharf
and plumply confronted Captain Cuttle and Dirk Hatteraick. It was no
less romance to our author. There is no greater error of those who are
called "practical men" than the supposition that life is, or can be,
other than a dream to a dreamer. Shut him up in a counting-room,
barricade him with bales of merchandise, and limit his library to the
ledger and cash-book and his prospect to the neighboring signs; talk
"Bills receivable" and "Sundries Dr. to cash" to him forever, and you
are only a very amusing or very annoying phantom to him. The
merchant-prince might as well hope to make himself a poet, as the poet