Autobiographic Sketches

Excerpt

I am on the point of revising and considerably altering, for
republication in England, an edition of such amongst my writings as
it may seem proper deliberately to avow.  Not that I have any intention,
or consciously any reason, expressly to disown any one thing that I
have ever published; but some things have sufficiently accomplished
their purpose when they have met the call of that particular transient
occasion in which they arose; and others, it may be thought on review,
might as well have been suppressed from the very first.  Things immoral
would of course fall within that category; of these, however, I cannot
reproach myself with ever having published so much as one.  But even
pure levities, simply as such, and without liability to any worse
objection, may happen to have no justifying principle of life within
them; and if, any where, I find such a reproach to lie against a paper
of mine, that paper I should wish to cancel.  So that, upon the whole,
my new and revised edition is likely to differ by very considerable
changes from the original papers; and, consequently, to that extent
is likely to differ from your existing Boston reprint.