Therefore, my aged friend of five-and-twenty, or thereabouts, pause at the threshold of this particular record, and ask yourself seriously whether you are fit to read such revelations as are to follow.  For observe, you have here no splendid array of petals such as poets offer you,—­nothing but a dry shell, containing, if you will get out what is in it, a few small seeds of poems.  You may laugh at them, if you like.  I shall never tell you what I think of you for so doing.  But if you can read into the heart of these things, in the light of other memories as slight, yet as dear to your soul, then you are neither more nor less than a POET, and can afford to write no more verses during the rest of your natural life,—­ which abstinence I take to be one of the surest marks of your meriting the divine name I have just bestowed upon you.

[May I beg of you who have begun this paper, nobly trusting to your own imagination and sensibilities to give it the significance which it does not lay claim to without your kind assistance,—­may I beg of you, I say, to pay particular attention to the brackets which enclose certain paragraphs?  I want my “asides,” you see, to whisper loud to you who read my notes, and sometimes I talk a page or two to you without pretending that I said a word of it to our boarders.  You will find a very long “aside” to you almost as soon as you begin to read.  And so, dear young friend, fall to at once, taking such things as I have provided for you; and if you turn them, by the aid of your powerful imagination, into a fair banquet, why, then, peace be with you, and a summer by the still waters of some quiet river, or by some yellow beach, where, as my friend, the Professor, says, you can sit with Nature’s wrist in your hand and count her ocean-pulses.]

I should like to make a few intimate revelations relating especially to my early life, if I thought you would like to hear them.

[The schoolmistress turned a little in her chair, and sat with her face directed partly towards me.—­Half-mourning now;—­purple ribbon.  That breastpin she wears has gray hair in it; her mother’s, no doubt;—­I remember our landlady’s daughter telling me, soon after the school-mistress came to board with us, that she had lately “buried a payrent.”  That’s what made her look so pale,—­kept the poor sick thing alive with her own blood.  Ah! long illness is the real vampyrism; think of living a year or two after one is dead, by sucking the life-blood out of a frail young creature at one’s bedside!—­Well, souls grow white, as well as cheeks, in these holy duties; one that goes in a nurse may come out an angel.—­God bless all good women!—­to their soft hands and pitying hearts we must all come at last!——­The schoolmistress has a better color than when she came.——­ ——­ Too late!——­“It might have been.”——­Amen!

——­How many thoughts go to a dozen heart-beats, sometimes!  There was no long pause after my remark addressed to the company, but in that time I had the train of ideas and feelings I have just given flash through my consciousness sudden and sharp as the crooked red streak that springs out of its black sheath like the creese of a Malay in his death-rage, and stabs the earth right and left in its blind rage.