FULLER.
The Commentators in the next millennium, and even in the next century, will I foresee, have no little difficulty, in settling the chronology of this opus. I do not mean the time of its conception, the very day and hour of that happy event having been recorded in the seventh chapter, A. I.: nor the time of its birth, that, as has been registered in the weekly Literary Journals, having been in the second week of January, 1834. But at what intervening times certain of its Chapters and Inter Chapters were composed.
A similar difficulty has been found with the Psalms, the Odes of Horace, Shakespeare's Plays, and other writings sacred or profane, of such celebrity as to make the critical enquiry an object of reasonable curiosity, or of real moment.
They however who peruse the present volume while it is yet a new book, will at once have perceived that between the composition of the preceding Chapter and their perusal thereof, an interval as long as one of Nourjahad's judicial visitations of sleep must have elapsed. For many of the great performers who figured upon the theatre of public life when the anticipations in that Chapter were expressed, have made their exits; and others who are not there mentioned, have since that time made their entrances.
The children of that day have reached their stage of adolescence; the youth are now in mid life; the middle-aged have grown old, and the old have passed away. I say nothing of the political changes that have intervened. Who can bestow a thought upon the pantomime of politics, when his mind is fixed upon the tragedy of human life?
Robert Landor, (a true poet like his great brother, if ever there was one) says finely in his Impious Banquet,
There is a pause near death when men grow bold
Toward all things else:
Before that awful pause, whenever the thought is brought home to us, we feel ourselves near enough to grow indifferent to them, and to perceive the vanity of all earthly pursuits, those only excepted which have the good of our fellow creatures for their object, and tend to our own spiritual improvement.
But this is entering upon a strain too serious for this place; though any reflection upon the lapse of time and the changes that steal on us in its silent course leads naturally to such thoughts.