we only give
a dangerous and unnatural impetus. Often, when in the fever of the
midnight, I have paused from my unshared and unsoftened studies, to
listen to the deadly pulsation of my heart,--[Falkland suffered much,
from very early youth, from a complaint in his heart]--when I have felt
in its painful and tumultuous beating the very life waning and wasting
within me, I have sickened to my inmost soul to remember that, amongst
all those whom I was exhausting the health and enjoyment of youth to
benefit, there was not one for whom my life had an interest, or by whom
my death would be honoured by a tear. There is a beautiful passage in
Chalmers on the want of sympathy we experience in the world. From my
earliest childhood I had one deep, engrossing, yearning desire,--and
that was to love and to be loved. I found, too young, the realisation of
that dream--it passed! and I have never known it again. The experience
of long and bitter years teaches me to look with suspicion on that
far recollection of the past, and to doubt if this earth could indeed
produce a living form to satisfy the visions of one who has dwelt
among the boyish creations of fancy--who has shaped out in his heart an
imaginary idol, arrayed it in whatever is most beautiful in nature, and
breathed into the image the pure but burning spirit of that innate love
from which it sprung! It is true that my manhood has been the undeceiver
of my youth, and that the meditation upon the facts has disenthralled me
from the visionary broodings over fiction; but what remuneration have I
found in reality? If the line of the satirist be not true, "Souvent
de tous nos maux la raison est le pire," [Boileau]--at least, like the
madman of whom he speaks, I owe but little gratitude to the act which,
"in drawing me from my error, has robbed me also of a paradise."

I am approaching the conclusion of my confessions. Men who have no ties
in the world, and who have been accustomed to solitude, find, with every
disappointment in the former, a greater yearning for the enjoyments
which the latter can afford. Day by day I relapsed more into myself;
"man delighted me not, nor women either." In my ambition, it was not
in the means, but the end, that I was disappointed. In my friends, I
complained not of treachery, but insipidity; and it was not because I
was deserted, but wearied by more tender connections, that I ceased to
find either excitement in seeking, or triumph in obtaining, their