For ages, Herodotus
was reckoned a credulous gossip in his descriptions of Africa, and
now the sublime silent desert testifies through the mouths of Bruce,
Lyons, Caillaud, Burckhardt, Belzoni, to the truth of the calumniated
historian.
And yet men imagine that books are dice, and have no merit in
their fortune; that the trade and the favor of a few critics can get
one book into circulation, and defeat another; and that in the
production of these things the author has chosen and may choose to do
thus and so. Society also wishes to assign subjects and methods to
its writers. But neither reader nor author may intermeddle. You
cannot reason at will in this and that other vein, but only as you
must. You cannot make quaint combinations, and bring to the crucible
and alembic of truth things far fetched or fantastic or popular, but
your method and your subject are foreordained in all your nature, and
in all nature, or ever the earth was, or it has no worth. All that
gives currency still to any book, advertised in the morning's
newspaper in London or Boston, is the remains of faith in the breast
of men that not adroit book makers, but the inextinguishable soul of
the universe reports of itself in articulate discourse to-day as of
old.
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