all-shadowy night? And shall he now regard with dismay the setting sun
of his earthly life? When he looks back, he sees the farthest cloud of
the sun-deserted east alive with a rosy hue. It is the prophecy of the
sunset concerning the dawn. For the sun itself is ever a rising sun,
and the morning will come though the night should be dark.

In this 'season of calm weather,' when the past has receded so far that
he can behold it as in a picture, and his share in it as the history of
a man who had lived and would soon die; when he can confess his faults
without the bitterness of shame, both because he is humble, and because
the faults themselves have dropped from him; when his good deeds look
poverty-stricken in his eyes, and he would no more claim consideration
for them than expect knighthood because he was no thief; when he cares
little for his reputation, but much for his character--little for what
has gone beyond his control, but endlessly much for what yet remains in
his will to determine; then, I think, a man may do well to write his
own life.

'So,' I imagine my reader interposing, 'you profess to have arrived at
this high degree of perfection yourself?'

I reply that the man who has attained this kind of indifference to the
past, this kind of hope in the future, will be far enough from
considering it a high degree of perfection. The very idea is to such a
man ludicrous. One may eat bread without claiming the honours of an
athlete; one may desire to be honest and not count himself a saint. My
object in thus shadowing out what seems to me my present condition of
mind, is merely to render it intelligible to my reader how an
autobiography might come to be written without rendering the writer
justly liable to the charge of that overweening, or self-conceit, which