But now a brisker air brought to my ears a burst of gladsome music; it came like the breath of flowers across the frozen plain, horns and trumpets on the church tower, sending their cheering harmonies over the sleeping earth, ushering, with glad vigorous tones, the first hour of the new year in to a world of anxious, doubting men. And I too grew glad and strong; I raised my glance from the white shroud of the coming spring, and gazed at the moon; and on these spots on her face (these spots which grow green as you approach) I saw our earthly spring reposing upon flowers, and already moving his young wings, soon to take his flight with other birds of passage, and, bright with glittering plumes, and hailed by skylarks’ anthems, come and alight upon our shores.
The distant new year’s music flowed around me still I felt much happier, and far more tender; I saw the coming sorrows in the new born year, but they wore such lovely masks that they were more like sorrows that are past, or like the music around me—just as the rain which falls through the great caverns in the Derbyshire hills sounds in the distance like music.
But when I looked around me, and saw the white earth shining like a white sun, and the silent deep blue sphere all round, like a household circle of one great family—and as the music, like lovelier sighs, accompanied my thoughts—as I fixed my gaze, with grateful heart, upon the starry sky where all these thousands of stedfast witnesses of the beautiful moments (moments faded, out of bloom, indeed, now—but the great Beneficence spreads their seed for evermore)—when I thought of the men asleep all around me, and wished that they might all be happier when they opened their eyes in the morning—and when I thought of those awake UNDER me, whose slumbering souls stood in need of such a wish,—my heart, oppressed by the music, and by the night, grew heavy and grew full, and the blue sky, the glittering moon, and the sparkling snow-height all melted into one great floating shimmer.
And in the shimmer, and amid the music, I heard voices of my friends, and dear fellow-creatures, tenderly and anxiously wishing their new year’s wishes. They touched my heart so deeply, that I could but barely think my own—
“Oh! may you all be happy all the years of your lives.”
END OF BOOK I.
PREFACE TO THE SECOND, THIRD, AND FOURTH BOOKS.
It has often been a source of much annoyance to me that to every preface I write I am obliged to append a book—like the endorsement on a bill of exchange—or an appendix to letters A to Z. Many a man who dabbles in authorship by way of amusement has his books sent to him all ready written and complete, straight from the cradle; so that all he has to do is to attach his gold frontlets of prefaces to their foreheads—which is nothing but painting the corona about the sun. As yet, however, not a single author has applied to me for a preamble to a book, although for several years I have had a considerable number of prefaces by me (all ready beforehand, and going at great bargains), in which I extol to the best of my ability works which have not as yet come in to being. In fact, I have now a perfect museum of these prize medals and commemoration medals of other people’s cleverness at the service of anyone who may stand in need of them; they are all made by the very finest of mint-machinery, and my collection of them is increasing day by day; so that I shall be obliged to sell it off wholesale before very long (I don’t see what else I can do), and bring out a book—consisting of nothing but pre-existent prefaces.
They will still be obtainable singly, however, until the Easter fair, and authors who make early application can have the entire fascicle of preludes forwarded to them, so that they can pick out for themselves whichever preface seems to them the most laudatory of a book. After the Easter fair however, when the Book of Prefaces above mentioned comes out (and it will be interleaved with the fair catalogue), the literary world will only be beglorified in corpore, in coro, and I shall be (so to speak) making a present of a patent of nobility to the republic of letters in the lump,—as the Empress Queen did in 1775 to the whole mercantile community of Vienna; although I have before my eyes (in the shape of the poor reviewers who work themselves well nigh to death, hammering and building away at the temple of fame, and at triumphal arches) the melancholy proof that though a man were to extol the republic of letters even in six volumes folio, he would get less for it than Sannazaro did for belauding the republic of Venice in as many lines—for each line in the latter case brought the poet in a matter of a hundred five-dollar pieces.
I propose to interstratify one of the prefaces in question in this place by way of a specimen and experiment, making as if its celebrated author had written it to order for this book (which is the actual truth, moreover). There is no difficulty in my splitting myself up into two characters, the flower painter and the preface maker. But,—as one cannot quite lose sight of feelings of becoming modesty—I carefully pick out the most miserable specimen of the lot, one in which laudation occurs but to a very moderate extent, one which places the author of the book attached to it upon a funeral car, rather than upon a triumphal one, with nothing whatever to draw it along moreover; whereas the other prefaces harness posterity to them, and the reading public are, by them, yoked on to the heavenly chariot, the Elijah’s chariot, of Immortality, in which they draw the author along.