timent noble and
impassioned from one of the great poets, and would ask me to repeat it.
He would have been a man of memorable energy, and for good purposes, had
it not been for his agony of conflict with pecuniary embarrassments.
These probably had commenced in some fatal compliance with temptation
arising out of funds confided to him by a client. Perhaps he had gained
fifty guineas for a moment of necessity, and had sacrificed for that
trifle _only_ the serenity and the comfort of a life. Feelings of
relenting kindness, it was not in my nature to refuse in such a case;
and I wished to * * * But I never succeeded in tracing his steps through
the wilderness of London until some years back, when I ascertained that
he was dead. Generally speaking, the few people whom I have disliked in
this world were flourishing people of good repute. Whereas the knaves
whom I have known, one and all, and by no means few, I think of with
pleasure and kindness.

Heavens! when I look back to the sufferings which I have witnessed or
heard of even from this one brief London experience, I say if life could
throw open its long suits of chambers to our eyes from some station
_beforehand_, if from some secret stand we could look _by anticipation_
along its vast corridors, and aside into the recesses opening upon them
from either hand, halls of tragedy or chambers of retribution, simply in
that small wing and no more of the great caravanserai which we ourselves
shall haunt, simply in that narrow tract of time and no more where we
ourselves shall range, and confining our gaze to those and no others for
whom personally we shall be interested, what a recoil we should suffer
of horror in our estimate of life! What if those sudden catastrophes, or
those inexpiable afflictions, which _have_ already descended upon the
people within my own knowledge, and almost below my own eyes, all of
them now gone past, and some long past, had been thrown open before me
as a secret exhibition when first I and they stood within the vestibule
of morning hopes; when the calamities themselves had hardly begun to
gather in their elements of possibility, and when some of the parties to
them were as yet no more than infants! The past viewed not _as_ the
past, but by a spectator who steps back ten years deeper into the rear,
in order that he may regard it as a future; the calamity of 1840
contemplated from the station of 1830--the doom that rang the knell of
happiness viewed