But the greatest difficulty with the “occasional” as well as shorter pieces of a volume of poems, is the difference between the circumstances under which they were severally penned, and those under which they are perused. One reads, in the self-same hour, the diversified productions of years. How, then, can a writer anticipate the appreciation of his sentiments? He has ceased to enter into his _own_ peculiar, circumstance-generated emotions. How, therefore, may others take his views? To suppose an ability on the part of the critic, to do justice, then, to the earlier and less-studied _morceaux_, (or, as I have styled them above, the egotistical pieces of an author,) would be to suppose an utter impossibility—a sort of critical _ubiquity_. Coleridge felt the truth of what I have advanced,—as any one may learn from the preface of his “Juvenile Poems.” He therein expresses his apprehensions in the following language:—“I shall only add, that each of my readers will, I hope, remember that these poems, on various subjects, which he reads at one time, and under the influence of one set of feelings, were written at different times, and prompted by very different feelings; and, therefore, the inferiority of one poem to another, may, sometimes, be owing to the temper of mind in which he happens to peruse it.” What shall we say, then? Shall an author abstain from publishing his shorter and occasional pieces, on account of the facts alluded to by Coleridge? By no means, I would say, though a consideration thereof may well deter the judicious writer from admitting into his volume every thing he may have penned. As to the dimensions of pieces, it may be more advisable, in some cases, to republish the shortest sonnets, and the like, relating to one’s own personal feelings and relations, than longer productions—at least they are likely to be more pleasing to the general reader. They are unquestionably useful, as throwing light upon points of a man’s private history with a force of illumination which no biographer could use, were he to attempt it—a something, by-the-bye, which seldom happens; indicating the probability, that we seldom read _the_ man’s real biography, but merely _a_ man’s—often an ideal man only.