beach ere the purer elements that it contains can be
wafted through the immensity of immortality. I will commune with my
boyish days--I will live in the past only. Memory shall perform the
Medean process, shall renovate me to youth. I will again return to
marbles and an untroubled breast--to hoop and high spirits--at least, in
imagination.

I shall henceforward trust to my own recollections. Should this part of
my story seem more like a chronicle of sensations than a series of
events, the reader must bear in mind that these sensations are, in early
youth, real events, the parents of actions, and the directors of
destiny. The circle in which, in boyhood, one may be compelled to move,
may be esteemed low; the accidents all round him may be homely, the
persons with whom he may be obliged to come in contact may be mean in
apparel, and sordid in nature; but his mind, if it remain to him pure as
he received it from his Maker, is an unsullied gem of inestimable price,
too seldom found, and too little appreciated when found, among the
great, or the fortuitously rich. Nothing that is abstractedly mental,
is low. The mind that well describes low scenery is not low, nor is the
description itself necessarily so. Pride, and contempt for our
fellow-creatures, evince a low tone of moral feeling, and is the innate
vulgarity of the soul; it is this which but too often makes those who
rustle in silks and roll in carriages, lower than the lowest.

I have said this much, because the early, very early part of my life was
passed among what are reproachfully termed "low people." If I describe
them faithfully, they must still appear low to those who arrogate to
themselves the epithet of "high." For myself; I hold that there is
nothing low under the sun, except meanness. Where there is utility
there ought to be honour. The utility of the humble artisan has never
been denied, though too often despised, and too rarely honoured; but I
have found among the "vulgar" a horror of meanness, a self-devotion, an
unshrinking patience under privation, and the moral courage, that
constitute the hero of high life. I can also tell the admirers of the
great, that the evil passions of the vulgar are as gigantic, their
wickedness upon as grand a scale, and their notions of vice as refined,
and as extensive, as those of any fashionable _roue_ that is courted
among the first circles, or even as those of the crowned despot. Then,
as to the strength