“‘The world will find me after many a day,’ as Southey says of one of his books.  I doubt if it ever did.  The Doctor contends that Southey was a poet; but then he thinks I am, also!

“What a deuce of a clamor is made about this new comet or planet!  What a useful thing to us poor, mud-stranded mortals to find out that there is another little fragment of a world, away some hundreds of millions of miles, outside of no particular where—­for I believe this astronomical detective is only on its track!  The Doctor is in ecstacies over it, takes it as a special personal favor, and declaims luminously and constellationally about writing one’s name among the stars, like that frisky cow who, in jumping over the moon, upon a time, made the milky way.  I’ve always had some doubts about that exploit; but then there is the mark she left.  Your friend Roberts is uneasy about this new star business; he is afraid that it will unsettle the cheese market, and he don’t know about it, nor do I.

“There!  I got home only last night, and haven’t heard any news to write you.  Some time I will tell of two or three things I saw and heard, and about some of our cousins, who regard us as belonging to the outer and lower skirts of the race.  If I am to be one end of a family, let it be the beginning.

“Mother sends love.  Edward and George speak of you constantly.  I’ve not seen our Major since my return.

“Write me a good, sharp, cutting, criticising, deuced brotherly letter soon.  As ever,

“Bart.

“P.S.  Have you read Pickwick?

“B.”

It was full of badinage, with only a dip or two into an absorbing purpose that he had fully formed, and which he evidenced to himself by the summary expulsion of the muses.

In the world of nature and humanity, is there such an embodiment of contradictions and absurdities as a youth in his transit from the dreamland of boyhood to the battle-field of manhood, through a region partaking of both, and abounding with strange products of its own?  I am not speaking of the average boy, such boys as make up the male mass of the world—­the undreaming, unthinking, plodding, drudging, sweating herd, whose few old commonplace, well-worn ideas don’t possess the power of reproduction, and whose thoughts are thirteenth or thirteen hundredth-handed, and transmitted unimpregnated to other dullards, and whose life and spirit is that of the young animal merely—­but a real young man, one of possibilities, intended for a man, and not merely for a male, one in whom the primitive forces of nature are planted, and who may develop into a new driving or forming power.  What a mad, impulsive, freaky thing it is!  You may see him bruising his still soft head a score of times against the impossible, and he will still contend that he can do it.  He will spring frantically up the face of an unclimbable precipice, as the young salmon leaps up a cataract, and die in the faith that he can go up it.