denied me. This is only a record of broken and apparently unrelated
memories, some of them as distinct and sequent as brilliant beads
upon a thread, others remote and strange, having the character of
crimson dreams with interspaces blank and black--witch-fires glowing
still and red in a great desolation.

Standing upon the shore of eternity, I turn for a last look landward
over the course by which I came. There are twenty years of
footprints fairly distinct, the impressions of bleeding feet. They
lead through poverty and pain, devious and unsure, as of one
staggering beneath a burden -


Remote, unfriended, melancholy, slow.


Ah, the poet's prophecy of Me--how admirable, how dreadfully
admirable!

Backward beyond the beginning of this via dolorosa--this epic of
suffering with episodes of sin--I see nothing clearly; it comes out
of a cloud. I know that it spans only twenty years, yet I am an old
man.

One does not remember one's birth--one has to be told. But with me
it was different; life came to me full-handed and dowered me with all
my faculties and powers. Of a previous existence I know no more than
others, for all have stammering intimations that may be memories and
may be dreams. I know only that my first consciousness was of
maturity in body and mind--a consciousness accepted without surprise