and I shall leave no son to inherit my share of life, with a better
sense of its privileges and duties, when his father should vanish like a
bubble; so that few mortals, even the humblest and the weakest, have
been such ineffectual shadows in the world, or die so utterly as I must.
Even a young man's bliss has not been mine. With a thousand vagrant
fantasies, I have never truly loved, and perhaps shall be doomed to
loneliness throughout the eternal future, because, here on earth, my
soul has never married itself to the soul of woman.

"Such are the repinings of one who feels, too late, that the sympathies
of his nature have avenged themselves upon him. They have prostrated,
with a joyless life and the prospect of a reluctant death, my selfish
purpose to keep aloof from mortal disquietudes, and be a pleasant idler
among care-stricken and laborious men. I have other regrets, too,
savoring more of my old spirit. The time has been when I meant to visit
every region of the earth, except the poles and Central Africa. I had a
strange longing to see the Pyramids. To Persia and Arabia, and all the
gorgeous East, I owed a pilgrimage for the sake of their magic tales.
And England, the land of my ancestors! Once I had fancied that my sleep
would not be quiet in the grave unless I should return, as it were, to
my home of past ages, and see the very cities, and castles, and battle-
fields of history, and stand within the holy gloom of its cathedrals,
and kneel at the shrines of its immortal poets, there asserting myself
their hereditary countryman. This feeling lay among the deepest in my
heart. Yet, with this homesickness for the father-land, and all these
plans of remote travel,--which I yet believe that my peculiar instinct
impelled me to form, and upbraided me for not accomplishing,--the utmost
limit of my wanderings has been little more than six hundred miles from
my native village. Thus, in whatever way I consider my life, or what
must be termed such, I cannot feel as if I had lived at all.