grateful respect of the Future, which men ever give to that genius whose
objects are knit with mankind? Suddenly, in the zenith of life, amidst
cheers, not of genuine renown,--cheers loud and brief as a mob's hurrah--
calamities, all of which I know not, nor conjecture, interrupt your
career;--and when your own life-long object is arrested, or rather when
it is snatched from your eye, your genius renounces all uses. Fame,
ever-during, was before you still, had your objects been those for which
genius is given. You muse. Heaven permits these rude words to strike
home! Guy Darrell, it is not too late! Heaven's warnings are always in
time. Reflect, with the one narrow object was fostered and fed the one
master failing of Pride. To us as Christians, or as reasoners, it is not
in this world that every duty is to find its special meed; yet by that
same mystical LAW which makes Science of Sorrow, rewards are but often
the normal effect of duties sublimely fulfilled. Out of your pride and
your one-cherished object, has there grown happiness? Has the success
which was not denied you achieved the link with posterity that your hand,
if not fettered, would long since have forged? Grant that Heaven says
'Stubborn child, yield at last to the warnings vouchsafed to thee by my
love! From a son so favoured and strong I exact the most difficult
offering! Thou hast sacrificed much, but for ends not prescribed in my
law; sacrifice now to me the thing thou most clingest to--Pride. I make
the pang I demand purposely bitter. I twine round the offering I ask the
fibres that bleed in relaxing. What to other men would be no duty, is
duty to thee, because it entails a triumphant self-conquest, and pays to
Humanity the arrears of just dues long neglected.' Grant the hard
sacrifice made; I must think Heaven has ends for your joy even here, when
it asks you to part with the cause of your sorrows;--I must think that
your evening of life may have sunshine denied to its noon. But with God
are no bargains. A virtue, the most arduous because it must trample down
what your life has exalted as virtue, is before you; distasteful,