I have never truly loved, and perhaps shall be doomed to loneliness
throughout the eternal future, because, here on earth, my soul has never
married itself to the soul of woman.

"Such are the repinings of one who feels, too late, that the sympathies
of his nature have avenged themselves upon him. They have prostrated,
with a joyless life and the prospect of a reluctant death, my selfish
purpose to keep aloof from mortal disquietudes, and be a pleasant idler
among care-stricken and laborious men. I have other regrets, too,
savoring more of my old spirit. The time has been when I meant to visit
every region of the earth, except the poles and Central Africa. I had a
strange longing to see the Pyramids. To Persia and Arabia, and all the
gorgeous East, I owed a pilgrimage for the sake of their magic tales.
And England, the land of my ancestors! Once I had fancied that my sleep
would not be quiet in the grave unless I should return, as it were, to
my home of past ages, and see the very cities, and castles, and
battle-fields of history, and stand within the holy gloom of its
cathedrals, and kneel at the shrines of its immortal poets, there
asserting myself their hereditary countryman. This feeling lay among the
deepest in my heart. Yet, with this homesickness for the fatherland, and
all these plans of remote travel,--which I yet believe that my peculiar
instinct impelled me to form, and upbraided me for not accomplishing,--
the utmost limit of my wanderings has been little more than six
hundred miles from my native village. Thus, in whatever way I consider
my life, or what must be termed such, I cannot feel as if I had lived
at all.

"I am possessed, also, with the thought that I have never yet discovered
the real secret of my powers; that there has been a mighty treasure
within my reach, a mine of gold beneath my feet, worthless because I