man; for I longed and yearned for it, but it never came.
My elder sister died when a child of two years. My father was then in the
zenith of his prosperity, and was absorbed in his affairs; yet this
loss--this heavy blow--came upon him like a thunderstroke. Many things
occupied his time, but this alone his mind. Deep sighs would escape him
in the active prosecution of his business, and his cheeks were suffused
with tears as he sped along the city's streets, sacred only to gain and
worldly commerce. He doated on his girls, and to lose one was to lose
half the joy of his existence. The effect of this calamity was otherwise
on my mother; and I revert to the difference in order to make clear to
you their respective natures. My mother wept at the death of her
child--she would not else have been a woman; but as I have seen weak
watery clouds pass across the moon's surface, leaving the planet
untouched and tranquil in their transit, so the thin veil of her sorrows
did not disturb the palpable unconcern--the neutrality of soul that were
behind. One easy flow of tears, and the claim of the departed was
satisfied. In a day, the privation had ceased to be one. Here then, sir,
are the seeds of a wilderness of after woe: my father, overflowing with
affection, and craving, as it were, for sympathy, turning to my mother,
and finding there a blank--nothing to rest upon. 'What is fortune,' says
the poet, 'to a heart yearning for affection, and finding it not? Is it
not as a triumphal crown to the brows of one parched with fever, and
asking for one fresh, healthful draught--_the cup of cold water_?' So it
was here, and hence husband and wife became soon estranged from one
another. The former, busy from hour to hour in his counting-house, had
little time to spare upon his children; the latter, with all her time at
her disposal, took no delight in the task. My sister and I, in our
infancy, were made over to strangers; and from the hands of the nurse we
were transmitted to those of the schoolmistress. When I was old enough, I
was removed from my sister's school, and placed, with a select number of
young gentlemen, under the care of a highly respectable master. It was
here that my pride began to take root. One of my schoolfellows was the
son of a general, another the son of a large landed proprietor, a third
was heir to a peerage, a fourth traced his ancestors to a period when the
soil was yet untrodden by a Norman foot. I was chagrined at my