CHAPTER XIV.

AN AUTHOR’S MIND:  PROBABILITIES.

My next book, published by Bentley in 1841, is in some sort a psychological curiosity,—­its title being “An Author’s Mind, the Book of Title-pages;” and when I add that it contains in succession sketches of thirty-four new brain-children, all struggling together for exit from my occiput, it may be imagined how impelled I was to write them all down (fixt, however briefly, in black and white) in order to get rid of them.  The book is printed as “edited” by me; whereas I wrote every word of it, but had not then the courage to say so, as certain things therein might well have offended some folks, and I did not wish that.  I think I will give here a bit of the prefatory “Ramble,” to show how the emptying out of my thought-box must have been a most wholesome, a most necessary relief:—­

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“Now, reader, one little preliminary parley with you about myself.  Here beginneth the trouble of authorship, but it is a trouble causing ease; ease from thoughts, thoughts, thoughts, which never cease to make one’s head ache till they are fixed on paper; ease from dreams by night and reveries by day (thronging up in crowds behind, like Deucalion’s children, or a serried host in front, like Jason’s instant army), harassing the brain, and struggling for birth, a separate existence, a definite life,—­ease, in a cessation of that continuous internal hum of aerial forget-me-nots, clamouring to be recorded.  O happy unimaginable vacancy of mind, to whistle as you walk for want of thought!  O mental holiday, now as impossible to me as to take a true schoolboy’s interest in rounders and prisoner’s base!  An author’s mind,—­and remember always, friend, I write in character, so judge not as egotistic vanity merely the well playing of my role,—­such a mind is not a sheet of smooth wax, but a magic stone indented with fluttering inscriptions,—­no empty tenement, but a barn stored to bursting—­it is a painful pressure, constraining to write for comfort’s sake,—­an appetite craving to be satisfied, as well as a power to be exerted,—­an impetus that longs to get away, rather than a dormant dynamic—­thrice have I (let me confess it) poured forth the alleviating volume as an author, a real author, real, because, for very peace of mind, involuntary,—­but still the vessel fills,—­still the indigenous crop springs up, choking a better harvest, seeds of foreign growth,—­still these Lernaean necks sprout again, claiming with many mouths to explain, amuse, suggest, and controvert, to publish invention, and proscribe error.  Truly it were enviable to be less apprehensive, less retentive,—­to be fitted with a colander-mind, like that penal cask which forty-nine Danaides might not keep from leaking; to be, sometimes at least, suffered for a holiday to ramble brainless in the paradise of fools.  Memory, imagination, zeal, perceptions of men and things,