my eyes, I should say to myself, 'What weary old man is thus venting his
spleen against the ambition which has failed, and the love which has
forsaken him?' Outwardly the very personation of youth, and revelling like
a butterfly in the warmth of the sun and the tints of the herbage, why
have you none of the golden passions of the young,--their bright dreams of
some impossible love, their sublime enthusiasm for some unattainable
glory? The sentiment you have just clothed in the illustration by which
you place yourself on a level with the sparrows is too mean and too gloomy
to be genuine at your age. Misanthropy is among the dismal fallacies of
gray beards. No man, till man's energies leave him, can divorce himself
from the bonds of our social kind."

"Our kind! Your kind, possibly; but I--" He swept his hand over his
brow, and resumed, in strange, absent, and wistful accents: "I wonder what
it is that is wanting here, and of which at moments I have a dim
reminiscence." Again he paused, and gazing on me, said with more
appearance of friendly interest than I had ever before remarked in his
countenance, "You are not looking well. Despite your great physical
strength, you suffer like your own sickly patients."

"True! I suffer at this moment, but not from bodily pain."

"You have some cause of mental disquietude?"

"Who in this world has not?"

"I never have."

"Because you own you have never loved. Certainly, you never seem to care
for any one but yourself; and in yourself you find an unbroken sunny