golden hours, what glorious advantages, what openings into new heavens of
science, what chances of illumining mankind were for ever lost to me!
Sometimes when the young, whom I taught some elementary, all-unheeded,
initiations into knowledge, came around me; when they looked me in the
face with their laughing eyes; when, for they all loved me, they told me
their little pleasures and their petty sorrows, I have wished that I
could have gone back again into childhood, and becoming as one of them,
enter into that heaven of quiet which was denied me now. Yet more often
it was with an indignant and chafed rather than a sorrowful spirit that I
looked upon my lot; and if I looked beyond it, what could I see of hope?
Dig I could; but was all that thirsted and swelled within to be dried up
and stifled, in order that I might gain the sustenance of life? Was I to
turn menial to the soil, and forget that knowledge was abroad? Was I to
starve my mind, that I might keep alive my body? Beg I could not. Where
ever lived the real student, the true minister and priest of knowledge,
who was not filled with the lofty sense of the dignity of his calling?
Was I to shew the sores of my pride, and strip my heart from its
clothing, and ask the dull fools of wealth not to let a scholar starve?
Pah!--He whom the vilest poverty ever stooped to this, may be the quack,
but never the trne disciple, of Learning. Steal, rob--worse--ay, all
those I or any of my brethren might do:--beg? never! What did I then? I
devoted the lowliest part of my knowledge to the procuring the bare means
of life, and the grandest,--the knowledge that pierced to the depths of
earth, and numbered the stars of heaven--why, that was valueless, save to
the possessor.

"In Knaresbro', at this time, I met a distant relation, Richard Houseman.
Sometimes in our walks we encountered each other; for he sought me, and I
could not always avoid him. He was a man like myself, born to poverty,
yet he had always enjoyed what to him was wealth. This seemed a mystery