Sidor som bilder
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DID he tell me who are the successful in life? were they not those who least often look beyond it? were they not the men who find their "be-all and their end-all here?" or at best but acquiesce in a blind faith? I might have told him who they are that are unsuccessful in life, as the world has it; they who would extend the narrow horizon of our knowledge-they who are always forgetting the actual present in the distant possible future-who relinquish what is, be it pleasurable or not, to think of what may be.

But I have learned by bitter experience, that the height of all wisdom is contentment. Have I not seen that cultivated mind is but half the man, whatever be the conceptions to which it is adequate? Oh! the vain aspirations of that mind!-It can but beat against the bars of its prison. It can but flutter with clipt wing.

If such as I am were to school men in the conduct of their lives, we should meet pity for our own disappointed hopes, or sneers for our conscious, yet confident weakness. But I, do I regret any thing for myself? It is perhaps a reparation to me for other and greater good, that I might have done, that I could tell a story, which if listened to, were profit. Small reparation still, the pungent yet wholesome fruits of early self-knowledge, instead of the ripe harvest that should bless the autumn of life.

When I review my life, far back as memory will carry me, do I see one step that I would not revoke, were it in my power? It is a usual reflection, but, I am persuaded, heartfelt with few. And why is it so with me? Have I crimes to confess? have I debauched my morals or debased my affections? No, not in thought. Has time fled with careless hours till I am his debtor for more than future industry will pay? Not so, these are common foibles. I plead guilty to none of these. I lament a whole existence misdirected. I lament my every power misapplied. I lament some of my best affections withered for want of sustenance.

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Was it my misfortune, or my fault? I used to admire the strongnerved and stout-hearted, breasting their way manfully as became their character, to reach those universal goals, wealth, honor, influence; but no muscle of mine would move for any of these. Not that I have never felt that they are worth a struggle, and understood how they lure so many, but this was only sometimes; in general, I saw no pleasure in life, but its bane was near at hand.

What set me on this way of thinking, I have often asked myself; but I can only say that I grew up in it. I can trace it to an early feeling that was too serious for boisterous and boyish sports. Yet I know that I was not stupid. Many of the wonderful things, that busy older minds, used to arrest my attention, interest my fancy, and make me look with disgust on what suited my years. I well remember this period of my life. The rational control that interfered with these tastes and habits, was irksome-the control that I too much needed. Yet, it could but be so. Who should know of what I was dreaming? My very existence always had to me, nay, alas! has to me, the vagueness of a dream.

My passions were awakened early. Susceptibility and intelligence strengthened together; and when meditation came with my years, and a new being seemed opening upon me-strange spells! how they bound me! how aversion to control deepened! on what high thoughts did I feed my mind! The mysteries of my own nature-its almost bewildering revelations of things never before conceived of within me the mysteries of higher natures-they would obtrude themselves. I revolved them, till they blinded my weak sight. I sickened at the thought of so much incomprehensible. In sooth, have I yet ceased to wonder?

Yet in these old aspirings to be something beyond my reach, I recognize no affectation. That books and arbitrary knowledge were little esteemed, I confess. But I do remember to have looked on external nature, not with a blind admiration. I loved true wit, and poetry. I found pleasure in all the wonders and beauties of art that are spoken of in books, and by men of travel. If pride resulted from what I thought superior intelligence, is it strange? I was a man in feeling; yet, forgetting the indispensable means, I was in real wisdom a very boy. And thus was it that in a discontented, doubting spirit, with habits and a love of seclusion fastening upon me, I seized only on the pleasant spots of academic studies, and had recourse to my own imaginings and fruitless speculations to fill the void. Was this wise, I sometimes ask myself? Far from it. Yet I did but follow the instinct that was born within me.

How fresh in my mind at this moment are the feelings with which I used to consider a contact with mankind, as one of them. The folly of past inertness rose up somewhat in judgment; the flower of youth was indeed gone, with promise of few fruits. Yet this was, perhaps, matter of indifference. It was no consciousness of inability

that haunted me, nor was it that I saw no field in which my talents would serve me; I saw nothing but variance among men; I saw that to do as the multitude, I must chain my thoughts to subjects the most insignificant of any that could engage them; and I said, earth has not an allurement that shall win me from the contemplation of truth,-if there be truth in which the mind can ever rest.

In my present apathy, I look back with astonishment at the enthusiasm that possessed me-improvident-ignorant of what constituted my happiness. Now, what part, I exclaimed, was I sent here to act? No philosophy had consolation for me, with my sombre views of men and life, and worse, my ill defined hopes of what might lie beyond it. Yet, thrust into the world, I felt that my only hope was in striving to gloss over the realities of an active existence, with something of that imagined beauty which they have to other men, wondering what strange obliquity deformed every thing I saw. I am well convinced that the difference in men's mental capacities is not more radical than in the temperament resulting from the influence of the body on the mind, and characterizing every action of the intellect; the nature of which is too subtle to be scrutinized. It is not something formed or superinduced. The same circumstances of education and association, as far as may be, acting upon very similar capacities, yet want much to make the same man. Our physical constitution rules our lives. There is your contented mind,

your restless, inquisitive mind-the one calmly indifferent to the world and its mysteries as such, or making a wise faith a salvo for his ignorance; squaring his conduct to a worldly policy-perhaps rising to the height of human ambition, worldly wise ;-I have observed such another, seeing nothing in him or about him in which to rest satisfied, yet panting for a perfection of the possibility of which he cannot certify himself, and all efforts for which he sees in the history of his species to have been futile. I can hardly yet resolve me, which of them is truly wise-true at least it is that the latter is but natural.

What a record for my first score of years is this! If I scan ever so closely the tablets on which they have left their indelible impressions, I find no action-no event. It all is a succession of beartwearying hopes and fears. The spring-time of life blighted by cares self imposed!

And this general distrust-this almost pyrrhonism-these heartsick longings-these cynic moralizings were sapping the vigor of my body. I had always felt that there is a spark of something not transient in our natures, which I must fan and feed for a future state. 1 felt, in what I thought a spirit of calm philosophy, that if life had nothing worth an endeavor, I might at least retire into myself, and aim at the happiness of true virtue, and ponder a method, derived from observation and the experience of my fellow-men. But inactivity and melancholy meditation were corroding my very frame.

What sensation is there like that that tells us of the lamp of life going slowly out within us! "Oh!" I would sometimes exclaim, "Is there nothing truly, lastingly beautiful or satisfactory, where there is such apparent complacence!" There is indeed one source, which is all this and more. The bright, the divinely ordered world of matter, that I have less esteemed than the labyrinthian workings of human The features of external nature are healthy-always radiant with the joy which her animating soul inspires-I must see new scenes-I must seek new circumstances.

I thought I had found a constant theme!

In this mind, I resolved on foreign travel to recruit my health and refresh my spirit. I dreamed of unusual pleasures in the strange sights of the old world, and can say I found something of it; and though I read only a condemnation of the pride of man, in the decay of his every work, yet, in the beautiful lineaments of the pervading mind so visibly impressed on nature, I found that on which I could meditate with delight—I found that to which I felt an alliance of something in me.

Thus I whiled away some years abroad-years never to be forgotten!-my mind ever exercised by the new and the beautiful, till at last weariness began to succeed to this too, and worked the revolution in my sentiments that has left me what I am, and what I shall remain-yet that has opened my eyes only when too late. Could I banish that hour from my recollection, I know not if I would: abasing as was the lesson-still it was salutary.

What is the loneliness of ruins, to that which greets us in pleasureseeking throngs, in Boulevards and Alamedas, where even life and joy are vapid to the mind, that centres by habit in itself! Though in a few short hours, gay thousands shall pass before your eyes, you may never find yourself so desolate as then.

What feelings came over me in such a scene, as I thought of closing my profitless wanderings! Memory was busy among the days of my past life. How I started-how I now start, to see the little there is upon which reflection loves to dwell. To what end have the marvels of nature and art that I have studied, impressed me? What do they teach me? What permanent resort yield, for restless faculties? Yet in my green days, I find myself as one that has grown old in the ways of the world. Oh! the vain task of severing one's self from an intercourse that we were made for! I have tested every means of rational happiness but one-the happiness that es in any of the active, absorbing businesses of life. Let me leave these shores where I have lingered too long-I will return to friends and familiar places-I will dash into the current of life-I will contest for some one of the rewards of exertion!

And I am returned-I landed last spring on these busy shoresNature was renewing her existence-I seemed waking to new life— my pulse heaved with new excitement. When lo! the silent finger

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