"A very Sea of Thought; neither calm nor clear, if you will, yet wherein the toughest SARTOR RESARTUS. NEW YORK: JOHN WILEY & SON, 535 BROADWAY. KE 3722 HARVARD Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1865, by JOHN WILEY & SON, In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the United States for tle PREFATORY. MỤCH time is wasted by human beings, in general, on establishment of systems; and it often takes more labour to master the intricacies of an artificial connexion, than to remember the separate facts which are so carefully connected. I suspect that system-makers, in general, are not of much more use, each in his own domain, than, in that of Pomona, the old women who tie cherries upon sticks, for the more convenient portableness of the same. To cultivate well, and choose well, your cherries, is of some importance; but if they can be had in their own wild way of clustering about their crabbed stalk, it is a better connexion for them than any other; and, if they cannot, then, so that they be not bruised, it makes to a boy of a practical disposition, not much difference whether he gets them by handfuls,* or in beaded symmetry on the exalting stick. I purpose, therefore, henceforward to trouble myself little with sticks or twine, but to arrange my chapters with a view to convenient reference, rather than to any careful division of subjects, and to follow out, in any by-ways that may open, on right hand or left, whatever question it seems useful at any moment to settle. * Or basketfuls? |