Motley Stones

"It was once said against me that I fashion only small things, and that my people are always ordinary people. If that is true, I am now in the position of offering readers something smaller and more insignificant still, namely an assortment of fancies for young hearts. Nor are they even meant to preach virtue and morals, as the custom is, but rather to work solely by what they are. If there is anything noble and good in me, it will exist in my writings on its own; but if it is not in my nature, I will strive in vain to depict the sublime and the beautiful, for baseness and ignobility will always show through. Fashioning great or small things was never the aim of my writings; I was guided by other laws entirely. Art is so high and exalted for me; for me, as I have said elsewhere, it is the highest thing on earth after religion, and so I have never regarded my writings as poetical, nor shall I presume to regard them so. The world has but a very few poets, who are the high priests, the benefactors of humanity; but it has a great many false prophets. Yet if not all spoken words can be poetry, they may be something else whose existence is not utterly unjustified. To give kindred spirits an hour of pleasure, to send forth greetings to all of them known or unknown, and add a grain of good to the edifice of the eternal, that was my writings' aim, and that it shall remain. I would be very glad to know for certain that I had achieved even this aim alone"--