IV A WORD TO THE SUBSCRIBERS OF 



to expect any answer: Are you trying to write and pub- 

 lish a book, in the midst of all this horror and distrac- 

 tion nights of sleepless anguish, days of despair? Are 

 you trying to repose and dream in a drum, or paint a 

 picture seated with your easel on a log-sled hauled by a 

 team of oxen over the rocks, roots, logs, and stumps of 

 a spruce-pine clearing; in short, have you been trying 

 to do in the broils of Bedlam that which, to do aright, 

 you should have quiet, absolute repose from all care 

 and anxiety, still nights of visions, golden mornings of 

 ecstatic influx, and brave days of spiritual wrestling, in- 

 spired by the gentle, heroic, and loving sympathy of the 

 living, with solemn beckonings and greetings of grace 

 and holiness from the dead? Then, did I understand 

 you to say that you were two hundred and fifty miles 

 from your publishers, two hundred and fifty miles from 

 libraries of any extent, where you could have access to 

 books of reference and quick facilities for correcting 

 proof, and so on ? And you have really, under all these 

 difficulties, been going through the torments of that ever- 

 lasting stone-rolling of Sisyphus of 1700 ems in a page, 

 i-dottings, t-crossings, commas stuck in by nineteen elab- 

 orate rules, colons by five, semicolons by five, periods by 

 five, etc.? 



These interrogations you answer all in the affirmative ? 

 Well, then, on thy brow be written FOOL! for a "thou- 

 sand years in heaven cannot recompense your miserable 

 heart" for such a blunder, or "make you capable of one 

 brief joy," after such a hideous folly! "Ah, me ! mis- 

 erable! which way shall I fly?" 



Pardon the unfortunate author, then, benevolent sub- 

 scriber! and, before sending him away from this court 

 under conduct of proper officers, "to be hanged by the 

 neck until dead, dead," (asking the Lord to have mercy 

 on his soul,) allow him to offer for your reconsideration 

 a few of the first explanatory words of the announcement 

 to the subscribers, published in the part of the book 

 printed some time since, as some apology for the pro- 

 tracted tedium and delay in the delivery of the whole 

 volume; for now the voice singing the song, the book 

 heralding the claims of the Mountain, so long promised, 

 is actually handed to you. It is, and from the surround- 



