moment has become once more a blank!

"It is singular," said Aram, "but often as I have paused at this spot,
and gazed upon this landscape, a likeness to the scenes of my childish
life, which it now seems to me to present, never occurred to me before.
Yes, yonder, in that cottage, with the sycamores in front, and the
orchard extending behind, till its boundary, as we now stand, seems lost
among the woodland, I could fancy that I looked upon my father's home.
The clump of trees that lies yonder to the right could cheat me readily
to the belief that I saw the little grove in which, enamoured with the
first passion of study, I was wont to pore over the thrice-read book
through the long summer days;--a boy,--a thoughtful boy; yet, oh! how
happy! What worlds appeared then to me, to open in every page! how
exhaustless I thought the treasures and the hopes of life! and beautiful
on the mountain tops seemed to me the steps of Knowledge! I did not dream
of all that the musing and lonely passion that I nursed was to entail
upon me. There, in the clefts of the valley, or the ridges of the hill,
or the fragrant course of the stream, I began already to win its history
from the herb or flower; I saw nothing, that I did not long to unravel
its secrets; all that the earth nourished ministered to one desire:--and
what of low or sordid did there mingle with that desire? The petty
avarice, the mean ambition, the debasing love, even the heat, the anger,
the fickleness, the caprice of other men, did they allure or bow down my
nature from its steep and solitary eyrie? I lived but to feed my mind;
wisdom was my thirst, my dream, my aliment, my sole fount and sustenance
of life. And have I not sown the whirlwind and reaped the wind? The glory
of my youth is gone, my veins are chilled, my frame is bowed, my heart is
gnawed with cares, my nerves are unstrung as a loosened bow: and what,
after all, is my gain? Oh, God! what is my gain?"