, with more justness than originality: "Men is,
properly speaking, based upon Hope, he has no other possession but Hope;
this world of his is emphatically the Place of Hope." What, then, was
our Professor's possession? We see him, for the present, quite shut out
from Hope; looking not into the golden orient, but vaguely all round
into a dim copper firmament, pregnant with earthquake and tornado.

Alas, shut out from Hope, in a deeper sense than we yet dream of!
For, as he wanders wearisomely through this world, he has now lost
all tidings of another and higher. Full of religion, or at least of
religiosity, as our Friend has since exhibited himself, he hides not
that, in those days, he was wholly irreligious: "Doubt had darkened into
Unbelief," says he; "shade after shade goes grimly over your soul, till
you have the fixed, starless, Tartarean black." To such readers as have
reflected, what can be called reflecting, on man's life, and happily
discovered, in contradiction to much Profit-and-Loss Philosophy,
speculative and practical, that Soul is not synonymous with Stomach;
who understand, therefore, in our Friend's words, "that, for man's
well-being, Faith is properly the one thing needful; how, with it,
Martyrs, otherwise weak, can cheerfully endure the shame and the cross;
and without it, Worldlings puke up their sick existence, by suicide, in
the midst of luxury:" to such it will be clear that, for a pure moral
nature, the loss of his religious Belief was the loss of everything.
Unhappy young man! All wounds, the crush of long-continued Destitution,
the stab of false Friendship and of false Love, all wounds in thy so
genial heart, would have healed again, had not its life-warmth been
withdrawn. Well might he exclaim, in his wild way: "Is there no God,
then; but at best an absentee God, sitting idle, ever since the first
Sabbath, at the outside of his Universe, and _see_ing it go? Has the
word Duty no meaning; is what we call Duty no divine Messenger and
Guide, but a false earthly Phantasm, made up of Desire and Fear, of
emanations from the Gallows and from Doctor Graham's Celestial-Bed?
Happiness of an approving Conscience! Did not Paul of Tarsus, whom
admiring men have since named Saint, feel that _he_ was 'the chief of
sinners;' and Nero of Rome, jocund in spirit (_wohlgemuth_), spend much
of his time in fiddling? Foolish Wordmonger and Motive-grinder, who in
thy Logic-mill hast an earthly mechanism for the Godlike