beauty or deformity has any thing to do in the production of such
feelings. They have a mysterious origin, and are, in truth, not to be
accounted for or explained. A father sees the hope and joy of his manhood
deposited amongst the gardens of the soil, and from that moment the
fruitful fields and unobstructed sky are things he cannot gaze upon;
whilst the brother, who has lived in the court or alley of a crowded city
with the sister of his infancy, and has buried her, with his burning
tears, in the dense churchyard of the denser street, clings to the
neighbourhood, close and unhealthy though it be, with a love that renders
it for him the brightest and the dearest nook of earth. He cannot quit
it, and be at peace. Causes that seem alike, are not always so in their
effects. For my own part, for years after the first bitter lesson of my
life became connected with that city, I could not think of it without
pain, or hear its name spoken without suffering a depression of spirits,
as difficult to throw off as are the heavy clouds that follow in the
track, and hide the little light of a December sun. At school, I remember
well how grievously I wept upon the map on which I first saw the word
written, and how completely I expunged the characters from the paper,
forbidding my eyes to glance even to the county from which I had erased
them. Time passes, hardening the heart as it rolls over it, and we afford
to laugh at the strong feelings and extravagant views of our youth. It is
well, perhaps, that we do so; and yet on that subject a word or two of
profitable matter might be offered, which shall be withholden now. For
many years I have battled through the world, an orphan, on my own
account; and it is not surprising that the vehemence of my early days
should have gradually sobered down before the stern realities that have
at every step encountered me. Long before I received the unwelcome
intelligence, that it was literally incumbent upon me to revisit the spot
of my beloved mother's dissolution, the mention of its name had ceased to
evoke any violent emotion, or to affect me as of old. I say _unwelcome_,