entreaty, freeze it with an icy unanswering gaze; while the ear, that
delicate messenger to the inmost sanctuary of the soul, can still take in
the tones of kindness, put it off with hard civility, or sneering
compliment, or envious affectation of indifference; while the creative
brain can still throb with the sense of injustice, with the yearning for
brotherly recognition--make haste--oppress it with your ill-considered
judgements, your trivial comparisons, your careless misrepresentations.
The heart will by and by be still--"ubi saeva indignatio ulterius cor
lacerare nequit"; the eye will cease to entreat; the ear will be deaf;
the brain will have ceased from all wants as well as from all work. Then
your charitable speeches may find vent; then you may remember and pity
the toil and the struggle and the failure; then you may give due honour
to the work achieved; then you may find extenuation for errors, and may
consent to bury them.

That is a trivial schoolboy text; why do I dwell on it? It has little
reference to me, for I shall leave no works behind me for men to honour.
I have no near relatives who will make up, by weeping over my grave, for
the wounds they inflicted on me when I was among them. It is only the
story of my life that will perhaps win a little more sympathy from
strangers when I am dead, than I ever believed it would obtain from my
friends while I was living.

My childhood perhaps seems happier to me than it really was, by contrast
with all the after-years. For then the curtain of the future was as
impenetrable to me as to other children: I had all their delight in the
present hour, their sweet indefinite hopes for the morrow; and I had a
tender mother: even now, after the dreary lapse of long years, a slight
trace of sensation accompanies the remembrance of her caress as she held
me on her knee--her arms round my little body, her cheek pressed on mine.