From the PREFACE.
IN gathering these papers from The Independent, I first tried to link a chain of editorial opinions on the chief public questions of the last seven years. But an editorial article is like a June lily; it blooms for a day, then fades. I found that almost every essay had been so moulded to the vanishing image of the flying hour -- so tempered to the changeful pulse of the popular heart -- as to need in re-publication a troublesome fringe of explanatory notes. So the whole quiver of arrows had to be condemned, seeing how time had rusted their chief points.
Instead of a chronological commentary on slavery, civil war, emancipation, and suffrage, the present series is a mosaic of biography, art, politics, and criticism. Nevertheless, as I should be ashamed of my pen if in its lighter tasks it could forget its serious aims, these pages bear an incidental testimony against enslaving negroes, against hanging criminals, against murdering Indians, against oppressing Chinamen, and against disfranchising women.
The articles were written with no ambition for their permanent sepulture in this ostentatious tomb. Some of them I had entirely forgotten, until, in searching the file, I came upon them unexpectedly. Others I might never have read a second time, had I not been asked to revise them for this volume. Only one among them holds a high place in my affection: I mean the opening sketch, which, slight as it is, and altogether a trifle, nevertheless had the happy fortune of first making me known as a writer. I vividly remember how I kissed the page on which I first saw it in print. Neither the Merchant of Venice, nor the Mask of Comus, nor the Vicar of Wakefield ever pleased me half so much as my first perusal of the published narrative of A Visit to Washington Irving. I was the last stranger who saw him alive. Kind old man! He took my hand in his, as if he had been my grandfather, and said at parting, I hope you will win a name among your countrymen. The ink was hardly dry on the printed sheet when all the citys flags sank to half-mast at his sudden death. Instantly the sketch caught a dignity not its own -- stole, I may say, a plume from his hearse. It was simultaneously copied into not less than five hundred journals, as if it had been a presidents message -- only (I trust) not quite so bad. Thus it unexpectedly fulfilled the good wishes of its subject by lifting the unknown name of its writer out of the shadow into the sun. My critics are welcome to ply a birch switch on all the rest of my bantlings, but I pray them to be gentle to my first-born. In my own eyes, the opening leaves of this book wear even yet their spring-time glory; and for the sake of these unfaded few, I can bear to be told that the others are already summer-wilted, or even winter-killed.
I will add that this medley of miscellanies would stand inscribed to my friend Frederick Douglass, except that his worth merits a worthier book.