Portland, Maine
THOMAS B. MOSHER
Mdcccxcix
This First Edition on Van Gelder paper consists of 925 copies.
PREFACE
PREFACE.
For now some ten or twelve years I have been asking every good writer whom I knew, to write some part of what was exactly true, in the greatest of the sciences, that of Humanity. It seemed to me time that the Poet and Romance-writer should become now the strict historian of days which, professing the openest proclamation of themselves, kept yet in secrecy all that was most beautiful, all that was most woful, in the multitude of their unshepherded souls. And, during these years of unanswered petitioning, I have become more and more convinced that the wholesomest antagonism to whatever is dangerous in the temper, or foolish in the extravagance, of modern Fiction, would be found in sometimes substituting for the artfully-combined improbability, the careful record of providentially ordered Fact.
Providentially, I mean, not in the fitting together of evil so as to produce visible good,—but in the enforcement, though under shadows which mean but the difference between finite and infinite knowledge, of certain laws of moral retribution which enough indicate for our guidance, the Will, and for our comfort the Presence, of the Judge and Father of men.
It might be thought that the function of such domestic history was enough fulfilled by the frequency and full detail of modern biography. But lives in which the public are interested are scarcely ever worth writing. For the most part compulsorily artificial, often affectedly so,—on the whole, fortunate beyond ordinary rule,—and, so far as the men are really greater than others, unintelligible to the common reader,—the lives of statesmen, soldiers, authors, artists, or any one habitually set in the sight of many, tell us at last little more than what sort of people they dealt with, and of pens they wrote with; the personal life is inscrutably broken up,—often contemptibly, and the external aspect of it merely a husk, at the best. The lives we need to have written for us are of the people whom the world has not thought of,—far less heard of,—who are yet doing the most of its work, and of whom we may learn how it can best be done.