But to thee, noble spirit, who art weary of the age and of the after-winter of humanity, to whom sometimes, but not always, the human race, like the moon, seems to go backward, because thou mistakest the procession of clouds flying by below it for the course of the heavenly body, and who, full of exalted sighs, full of exalted wishes, and with silent resignation, hearest indeed beside thee a destroying hand and the falling of thy brothers, but yet castest not down thy eye, upraised to the ever serene, sunny face of Providence, and whom misfortune, as lightning does man, destroys, but not _disfigures_; to thee, noble spirit, I have, to be sure, not the courage to say, "Deign to look upon my play of shadows, that the Evening-Star which I usher before thee may make thee forget the earth on which thou standest, and which now with a thousand graves lays itself, like a vampyre, upon the human race, and sucks the blood of victims!"--And yet I have thought of thee all through the book, and the hope of bringing my little night and evening piece before wet, upraised, and steadfast eyes has been the sustaining maul-stick[6] of my weary hand. As I have now written too seriously, I must, out of the seven promised petitions, among which only four are such, omit three. I therefore present only the First Request. That the reader will pardon the title, "Dog-Post-Days," until the first chapter has explained and excused it; and the Second. Always to read a whole chapter, and never half a one, because the great whole consists of little wholes, as, according to the Homoiomereia[7] of Anaxagoras, the human body consists of innumerable little human bodies; and the Seventh Request, which flows partly from the second, but concerns the critics only, not to anticipate me in their _fugitive leaves_,[8] which they call Reviews, by the publication of my leading incidents, but to leave the reader some few surprises, which, to be sure, he can have only once. And finally the Fifth Petition, which one knows already from the Lord's Prayer.[9] CONCLUSION.