"As for that," said Reuben, "I've got a trunk over in town which couldn't be brought last night. If you will have that sent for, I'll be obliged to ye." "Sartin! sartin!" And Mr. Ducklow drove away, greatly to the relief of Mrs. Ducklow, who, listening to the alarming conversation, and remembering the bonds under the carpet, and the matches in the pantry, and Taddy's propensity to mischief, felt herself (as she afterwards confessed) "jest ready to fly." WILHELM MEISTER'S APPRENTICESHIP. It may be that I have never read to the core any one grand, representative book. How, indeed, amid the tumult and toss of our sea-sick life, is one to do so? How, again, while the presses of all literary capitals swarm with books that in one way or another demand attention, shall one do justice to books which are to be read as life is lived,--_not_ in a minute? Only by some hardihood can one pronounce it possible. But if to any great book I have done this justice, it is to that above named. At the first reading, "Wilhelm Meister," as a whole, was quite opaque to me, while some of the details were unpleasing, and the coolness of tone seemed to betoken coldness of heart; and it was only the observations and aphorisms, scattered like a profusion of pearls through the work, that drew me to it a second time. On a second reading, a year later, I began to see that the characters were representative of permanent classes,--that they were not only "samples to judge of," as Carlyle says, but samples by which to judge of human nature. At a third reading, after another interval, I began to get some glimpse of a total significance. And when, a year later, I took the book with me to the coast of Maine, and _lived_ with it, in-doors and out, for a solid month, this significance came forth clearly, and made that month's reading almost equivalent to a great experience. It is now nearly ten years, since, chiefly for my own behoof, but also not without an ultimate eye to publication, I drew up a formal statement of that which the book stood for to my mind. Time has added much to that material; for the work steadily grew upon me, and now and then extorted, as it were, notes, special dissertations, word-clutches at the meaning of the whole. And now, taking a hint from the handsome new edition, I propose to smelt this rough ore and send it forth, to fare as it may with the readers of the "Atlantic." The liberal editor allows me two papers of not far from ten pages each, in which to make this statement,--not, one sees, without some tolerant wish that a smaller space had sufficed. But even now I cast aside half my material, and double my labor in seeking brevity for the rest.