From the Oak to the Olive: A Plain Record of a Pleasant Journey

Not being, at this moment, in the pay of any press, whether foreign or domestic, I will not, at this my third landing in English country, be in haste to accomplish the correspondent's office of extroversion, and to expose all the inner processes of thought and of nature to the gaze of an imaginary public, often, alas! a delusory one, and difficult to be met with. No individual editor, nor joint stock company, bespoke my emotions before my departure. I am, therefore, under no obligation to furnish for the market, with the elements of time and of postage unhandsomely curtailed. Instead, then, of that breathless steeple chase after the butterfly of the moment, with whose risks and hurry I am intimately acquainted, I feel myself enabled to look around me at every step which I shall take on paper, and to represent, in my small literary operations, the three dimensions of time, instead of the flat disc of the present.

And first as to my pronoun. The augmentative We is essential for newspaper writing, because people are liable to be horsewhipped for what they put in the sacred columns of a daily journal. We may represent a vague number of individuals, less inviting to, and safer from, the cowhide, than the provoking egomet ipse. Or perhaps the We derives from the New Testament incorporation of devils, whose name was legion, for we are many. In the Fichtean philosophy, also, there are three pronouns comprised in the personal unity whose corporeal effort applies this pen to this paper, to wit, the I absolute, the I limited, and the I resulting from the union of these two. So that a philosopher may say we as well as a monarch or a penny-a-liner. Yet I, at the present moment, incline to fall back upon my record of baptism, and to confront the white sheet, whose blankness I trust to overcome, in the character of an agent one and indivisible.