have never known how to seek for it; and for want of perhaps one
fortunate idea, I am to die

'Unwept, unhonored, and unsung.'"

"Oberon" is represented as in the position of the "Story-Teller," and
leaves home because of some fancied oppression; he visits Niagara, of
which he gives some scenes as well as other anecdotes of his pedestrian
journey, but he falls ill and determines to return home to die. As he
approaches his birthplace he pleases himself with the fancy that there
is some youth there whom he can teach by the lesson of his life, and he
moralizes in a vein in which self-criticism may be read between the
lines:--

"He shall be taught by my life, and by my death, that the world is a sad
one for him who shrinks from its sober duties. My experience shall warn
him to adopt some great and serious aim, such as manhood will cling to,
that he may not feel himself, too late, a cumberer of this overladen
earth, but a man among men. I will beseech him not to follow an
eccentric path, nor, by stepping aside from the highway of human
affairs, to relinquish his claim upon human sympathy. And often, as a
text of deep and varied meaning, I will remind him that he is an
American."

Finally he describes the power he has obtained by the use of his
imagination, in the view of life:--

"I have already a spiritual sense of human nature, and see deeply into
the hearts of mankind, discovering what is hidden from the wisest. The
loves of young men and virgins are known to me, before the first kiss,