in my friendship: you must not attribute this to any suspiciousness
of nature, but must consider that I lived seventeen years my own
confidant, my own friend, full of projects and strange thoughts,
and confiding them to no one. I am habitually reserved, and
habitually cautious in letting it be seen that I hide any thing."

None knew better than himself that the aspirations and feelings of
which genius is the parent are often found to be inconsistent with
felicity:

"Oh! hear the plaint by thy sad favourite made,
His melancholy moan,
He tells of scorn, he tells of broken vows,
Of sleepless nights, of anguish-ridden days,
Pangs that his sensibility uprouse
To curse his being and his thirst for praise.
Thou gavest to him with treble force to feel
The sting of keen neglect, the rich man's scorn;
And what o'er all does in his soul preside
Predominant, and tempers him to steel,
His high indignant pride."

Nor was he unconscious that the toils necessary to secure literary
distinction, when endured by a shattered frame, are in the highest
degree severe. How much truth and feeling are there in the Lines
which he wrote after spending a whole night in study, an hour when
religious impressions force themselves with irresistible weight on
the exhausted mind:

"Oh! when reflecting on these truths sublime,