always something too soft for the aims and cravings of my mind. I felt
that I was wasting the young years of my life in a barren and wearisome
pursuit. What to me, who had outlived vanity, would have been the
admiration of the crowd! I sighed for the sympathy of the one! and I
shrunk in sadness from the prospect of renown to ask my heart for the
reality of love! For what purpose, too, had I devoted myself to the
service of men? As I grew more sensible of the labour of pursuing, I saw
more of the inutility of accomplishing, individual measures. There is
one great and moving order of events which we may retard, but we cannot
arrest, and to which, if we endeavour to hasten them, we only give a
dangerous and unnatural impetus. Often, when in the fever of the
midnight, I have paused from my unshared and unsoftened studies, to
listen to the deadly pulsation of my heart,--[Falkland suffered much,
from very early youth, from a complaint in his heart]--when I have felt
in its painful and tumultuous beating the very life waning and wasting
within me, I have sickened to my inmost soul to remember that, amongst
all those whom I was exhausting the health and enjoyment of youth to
benefit, there was not one for whom my life had an interest, or by whom
my death would be honoured by a tear. There is a beautiful passage in
Chalmers on the want of sympathy we experience in the world. From my
earliest childhood I had one deep, engrossing, yearning desire,--and that
was to love and to be loved. I found, too young, the realisation of that
dream--it passed! and I have never known it again. The experience of
long and bitter years teaches me to look with suspicion on that far
recollection of the past, and to doubt if this earth could indeed produce
a living form to satisfy the visions of one who has dwelt among the
boyish creations of fancy--who has shaped out in his heart an imaginary
idol, arrayed it in whatever is most beautiful in nature, and breathed
into the image the pure but burning spirit of that innate love from which
it sprung! It is true that my manhood has been the undeceiver of my