"With these sentiments, you may be assured that I wish success to your endeavor to rouse the spirit of the South in the cause of literature; to draw its intellectual energies from the everlasting and monotonous discussion of politics, which has run the same round of topics and arguments for forty years, and to allure her favored sons and daughters to the kinder and brighter fields of science and letters. If you shall be able to continue as you have begun, your subscribers will be amply remunerated for their patronage, and your contributors may be proud to see their lucubrations on your pages. It is well that you do not confine yourself to original compositions, but mix them with judicious and interesting selections from works of established reputation. Repeated experience has shewn that an editor cannot depend much upon the voluntary contributions of our own writers, however friendly to his design, who are too much occupied with their own concerns and the serious business of life, to be relied on as the support of such an enterprise as yours.... We have not yet a class or body of _authors by profession_; writing is the occupation of hours snatched from business, or the amusement of the few who have leisure for indulgence." FROM THE VALLEY OF VIRGINIA. "I look with much anxiety to your _Launch_, (which I wish had been the title of your work)--the first of any promise in Virginia, heartily desiring it God-speed--yet fearing that you may meet with some inaptitude or distaste to mere literary contribution from the educated of our citizens. This, however, cannot last long; you may feel it at the outset, but it will soon end; for I doubt not that the Messenger, as one of its best effects, will draw into literary exercise the talents which now lie fallow throughout the community, or which have long extravasated in politics and professions. The mind of Virginia is unquestionably a quarry from which much that is precious may be extracted; and you may and I hope will be able to expose its strata to the light, as the huntsman of the Andes exposed to the eye of the world, at the foot of the yielding shrub which he had seized upon for support, how rich and vast was the treasure which an unexamined surface had concealed." FROM SOUTHERN VIRGINIA.