beside yourself to whom I would frankly confide it. Pride of family is a
common infirmity,--often petulant with the poor, often insolent with the
rich; but rarely, perhaps, out of that pride do men construct a positive
binding duty, which at all self-sacrifice should influence the practical
choice of life. As a child, before my judgment could discern how much of
vain superstition may lurk in our reverence for the dead, my whole heart
was engaged in a passionate dream, which my waking existence became vowed
to realize. My father!--my lip quivers, my eyes moisten as I recall him,
even now,--my father!--I loved him so intensely!--the love of childhood,
how fearfully strong it is! All in him was so gentle, yet so sensitive,
--chivalry without its armour. I was his constant companion: he spoke to
me unreservedly, as a poet to his muse. I wept at his sorrows; I chafed
at his humiliations. He talked of ancestors as he thought of them; to
him they were beings like the old Lares,--not dead in graves, but images
ever present on household hearths. Doubtless he exaggerated their worth,
as their old importance. Obscure, indeed, in the annals of empire, their
deeds and their power, their decline and fall. Not so thought he; they
were to his eyes the moon-track in the ocean of history,--light on the
waves over which they had gleamed,--all the ocean elsewhere dark! With
him thought I; as my father spoke, his child believed. But what to the
eyes of the world was this inheritor of a vaunted name?--a threadbare,
slighted, rustic pedant; no station in the very province in which
mouldered away the last lowly dwelling-place of his line,--by lineage
high above most nobles, in position below most yeomen. He had learning;
he had genius: but the studies to which they were devoted only served yet
more to impoverish his scanty means, and led rather to ridicule than to
honour. Not a day but what I saw on his soft features the smart of a
fresh sting, the gnawing of a new care. Thus, as a boy, feeling in
myself a strength inspired by affection, I came to him one day as he sat
grieving, and kneeling to him, said, 'Father, courage yet a little while;