The sagacious reader knows well what is coming after this prelude.  He is accustomed to the phrases with which the plausible visitor, who has a subscription book in his pocket, prepares his victim for the depressing disclosure of his real errand.  He is not unacquainted with the conversational amenities of the cordial and interesting stranger, who, having had the misfortune of leaving his carpet-bag in the cars, or of having his pocket picked at the station, finds himself without the means of reaching that distant home where affluence waits for him with its luxurious welcome, but to whom for the moment the loan of some five and twenty dollars would be a convenience and a favor for which his heart would ache with gratitude during the brief interval between the loan and its repayment.

I wish to say a few words in my own person relating to some passages in my own history, and more especially to some of the recent experiences through which I have been passing.

What can justify one in addressing himself to the general public as if it were his private correspondent?  There are at least three sufficient reasons:  first, if he has a story to tell that everybody wants to hear,—­if he has been shipwrecked, or has been in a battle, or has witnessed any interesting event, and can tell anything new about it; secondly, if he can put in fitting words any common experiences not already well told, so that readers will say, “Why, yes!  I have had that sensation, thought, emotion, a hundred times, but I never heard it spoken of before, and I never saw any mention of it in print;” and thirdly, anything one likes, provided he can so tell it as to make it interesting.

I have no story to tell in this Introduction which can of itself claim any general attention.  My first pages relate the effect of a certain literary experience upon myself,—­a series of partial metempsychoses of which I have been the subject.  Next follows a brief tribute to the memory of a very dear and renowned friend from whom I have recently been parted.  The rest of the Introduction will be consecrated to the memory of my birthplace.

I have just finished a Memoir, which will appear soon after this page is written, and will have been the subject of criticism long before it is in the reader’s hands.  The experience of thinking another man’s thoughts continuously for a long time; of living one’s self into another man’s life for a month, or a year, or more, is a very curious one.  No matter how much superior to the biographer his subject may be, the man who writes the life feels himself, in a certain sense, on the level of the person whose life he is writing.  One cannot fight over the battles of Marengo or Austerlitz with Napoleon without feeling as if he himself had a fractional claim to the victory, so real seems the transfer of his personality into that of the conqueror while he reads.  Still more must this identification of “subject” and “object” take place when one is writing of a person whose studies or occupations are not unlike his own.