energy which the habit of self-dependence almost invariably produces; and
yet, the reader, if he be young, will scarcely feel surprise that the
resolution of the Student, to battle against incipient love, from
whatever reasons it might be formed, gradually and reluctantly melted
away. It may be noted, that the enthusiasts of learning and reverie have,
at one time or another in their lives, been, of all the tribes of men,
the most keenly susceptible to love; their solitude feeds their passion;
and deprived, as they usually are, of the more hurried and vehement
occupations of life, when love is once admitted to their hearts, there is
no counter-check to its emotions, and no escape from its excitation.
Aram, too, had just arrived at that age when a man usually feels a sort
of revulsion in the current of his desires. At that age, those who have
hitherto pursued love, begin to grow alive to ambition; those who have
been slaves to the pleasures of life, awaken from the dream, and direct
their desire to its interests. And in the same proportion, they who till
then have wasted the prodigal fervours of youth upon a sterile soil; who
have served Ambition, or, like Aram, devoted their hearts to Wisdom;
relax from their ardour, look back on the departed years with regret, and
commence, in their manhood, the fiery pleasures and delirious follies
which are only pardonable in youth. In short, as in every human pursuit
there is a certain vanity, and as every acquisition contains within
itself the seed of disappointment, so there is a period of life when we
pause from the pursuit, and are discontented with the acquisition. We
then look around us for something new--again follow--and are again
deceived. Few men throughout life are the servants to one desire. When we
gain the middle of the bridge of our mortality, different objects from
those which attracted us upward almost invariably lure us to the descent.
Happy they who exhaust in the former part of the journey all the foibles
of existence! But how different is the crude and evanescent love of that
age when thought has not given intensity and power to the passions, from