It is my purpose in writing these Memoirs to adhere rigidly to truth, at least in its essence. Should I succeed in this, my work will be a very remarkable one, almost unique. But, being a close observer, I have noticed that those who always tell the truth obtain immense credit, no matter how much they say that militates against themselves. The pleasure of speaking the truth at all times is immense. Lying is a very peculiar art: some use it merely as a convenience, and often have not the ability to forge a lie without including in it the contradiction. One takes pity on this class, endowed only with a pauper intellect and a pauper conscience.

Exaggerative liars are of a common class; it is somewhat difficult to reach their motive, because they neither serve themselves nor others. What they chiefly exaggerate is incomes; it must be due to a sanguine temperament.

The decidedly despicable liars are those who lie about themselves; but these have not the shrewdness to see their way safely. A man told me that he had been dining with a distinguished party at a certain club. He had not the knowledge necessary to give his lie substance; he was not aware that the rules of the club he named did not admit of a member entertaining any stranger there.

These are the three sorts of everyday liars; it is astonishing how completely every one knows them as such without their being in the least aware of the fact themselves, for we all pretend to believe liars to their face!

It is like possessing a fortune to be endowed with a love of truth for its own sake, and I doubt if any man was ever truly great without it. The mind of the truly gifted appears to me to lie parallel with nature, so that if an idea comes into being, all other ideas related to it are close at hand, and in a line with it.

The value of this view to the science of criticism is incommensurable: this I will now illustrate. The idea and its relations, which increase its intensity and beauty, may be variously expressed. Say Shakespeare knew a girl who was in love but concealed it, and so, pining, grew hectic and sallow; but bore it with patience. Such would be the prose version of the fact, and is not very emotional. But the poet would look as steadfastly at the sufferer as would a lover, then his sympathy would inflame, and in the developing of his mental vision he would see a rose that must prematurely perish through the cankering worm that gnaws at its heart. That rose is the hectic blush, its damask is reflected on the maiden cheek as she pines. But such an image cannot end here, this image of death in life; and in the next parallel appears a living monument of immortalizing sculpture beyond which the mind cannot rise.

Poetry is co-extensive with Nature, but cannot exceed her limits. She has her mystical number, which is three. Her suns rise; they reach their zenith; they have their setting: it is their morning, their noon, and their night. The earth has its three dimensions; the elements and all the things it consists of can assume but three forms, the solid, the liquid, the gaseous. Her productions have their three stages, and, running through these, they begin again. Man, in common with all that is organic, is born, he lives, he dies; the plant yearly has its growth, its flowering, its seed-time. This is the trinity of Nature; and poetry, which is her vocal manifestation, has its three parallels.

This truth, instances of which the reader himself may multiply at will, serves to illuminate the poetic argument which is to follow. An idea in imaginative poetry, which is the greatest and the only truly great, has three parallels as already exemplified; it cannot have more, and to be of the highest quality it cannot have less. There are as many sources of these parallels as there are objects in the three natural kingdoms, that most marvellous of the threefold series, the conjoint animal, vegetable, and mineral, in which all things subsist; in which every object is an ante-type of the poetic evolution just defined.

It is not necessary that these parallels should be separated by intervening details of any length, whence it is that short passages, or short poems like the sonnet, when woven with a due regard to their effectiveness, become poetic gems. Such are the first four lines of Shakespeare’s thirty-third sonnet; such are Coleridge’s lines on “Time Real and Imaginary,” and those on “Work without Hope.” All these I will now cite, numbering the parallels in their gradual ascent from the subject to its evolution, and thence into its transcendental expression in the ideal.

Shakespeare, in the citation “She never told her love,” gives out his subject in five words; from this he rises into the amplification of it through an exquisite metaphor and thence inters its divine ideal in imagery that can never be surpassed. Such is the working principle in imaginative verse, and it may be readily found that the principle does not pervade narrative poetry except in authors of the very highest class. It is the sure test of genius, so sure that a classification of the poets, in the order of their merit, might be based upon it.

It may be perceived that these poetic gems are as perfect in themselves as any epic of many pages. But as gems differ, so do these: the citations from Shakespeare and from Coleridge have their parallels in the line of ascent; they rise into their climax. The question whether the expression “slugs leave their lair,” should not be “stags leave their lair,” might surely be decided by reference to the first edition of “Work without Hope.” I possessed Gagliani’s reprint of Coleridge in 1832; if “slugs” in that issue stood as a printer’s error, the author was alive to protest against it. However, in an early edition of his poems, edited by Coleridge, I find it is “stags.” I feel that it was consonant with Coleridge’s mind to have begun the poem with “Slugs leave their lair;” it is not only more musical than “stags” through the triple alliteration, but more orderly, beginning with the slowest of animated creatures as typical of the condition of apathy that he was himself consigned to.