CHARLES AUCHESTER. CHAPTER I. I NEVER wrote a long letter in my life. It is the manual part I dislike; arranging the paper, holding the pen in my fingers, and finding my arm exhausted with carrying it to and from the inkstand. It does not signify, though; for I have made arrangements with my free will to write more than a letter-a life, or rather the life of a life;-let none pause to consider what this means, neither quite Germanly mysterious, nor quite Saxonly simple-like my origin. There are many literal presentations of ordinary personages, in books, which I am informed and I suppose I am to assure myself, are introduced expressly to intensify and illustrate the chief and peculiar interest, where an interest is; or to allure the attention of the implicit, where it is not. But how does it happen, that the delineations of the gods among men, the heroic gifted few, the beings of imaginative might or genius, are SO infinitely more literal? Who-worshipping, if not strong enough to serve the Ideal-can endure the graceless ignorance of his subject, betrayed by many a biographer, accepted and accomplished in his style? Who, so worshipping, can do anything but shudder at the meagre, crude, mistakeable portraits of Shakspere, of Verulam, of Beethoven? Heaven send my own may not make me shudder first; and that in my attempt to recall, through a kind of artistic interlight, a few remembered lineaments, I be not self-condemned to blush for the spiritual craft, whose first law only I have learned. I know how many notions grown persons entertain of their childhood as real, which are factitious, and founded upon elder experience until they become confounded with it; but I also feel that in great part we neglect our earliest impressions as vague, which were the truest and best we ever |