marked my succeeding years. I say dissipation, comparatively with the
strictness, and sobriety, and regularity of Presbyterian country life;
for though the will-o'-wisp meteors of thoughtless whim were almost the
sole lights of my path, yet early ingrained piety and virtue kept me
for several years afterward within the line of innocence. The great
misfortune of my life was to want an aim. I had felt early some
stirrings of ambition, but they were the blind gropings of Homer's
Cyclops round the walls of his cave. I saw my father's situation
entailed on me perpetual labour. The only two openings by which I
could enter the temple of fortune were the gate of niggardly economy or
the path of little chicaning bargain-making. The first is so
contracted an aperture I never could squeeze myself into it; the last I
always hated--there was contamination in the very entrance! Thus
abandoned of aim or view in life, with a strong appetite for
sociability, as well from native hilarity as from a pride of
observation and remark; a constitutional melancholy or hypochondriasm
that made me fly solitude; add to these incentives to social life my
reputation for bookish knowledge, a certain wild, logical talent, and a
strength of thought, something like the rudiments of good sense; and it
will not seem surprising that I was generally a welcome guest where I
visited, or any great wonder that always, where two or three met
together, there was I among them. But far beyond all other impulses of
my heart was a leaning toward the adorable half of humankind. My heart
was completely tinder, and was eternally lighted up by some goddess or
other; and, as in every other warfare in this world, my fortune was
various; sometimes I was received with favour, and sometimes I was
mortified with a repulse. At the plough, scythe, or reap-hook I feared
no competitor, and thus I set absolute want at defiance; and as I never
cared further for my labours than while I was in actual exercise, I
spent the evenings in the way after my own heart.