continue to feel. 'Twere an easy matter to produce such things
as pass for sermons among us, and to go respectably enough through the
mere routine of the profession; but I cannot help feeling that, though I
might do all this and more, my duty, as a clergyman, would be still left
undone. I want singleness of aim--I want earnestness of heart. I cannot
teach men effectually how to live well; I cannot show them, with aught
of confidence, how they may die safe. I cannot enter the Church without
acting the part of a hypocrite; and the miserable part of the hypocrite
it shall never be mine to act. Heaven help me! I am too little a
practical moralist myself to attempt teaching morals to others.

"But I must conclude my story, if story it may be called:--I saw my
poor mother and my little sister deprived, by my father's death, of
their sole stay, and strove to exert myself in their behalf. In the
daytime I copied in a lawyer's office; my nights were spent among the
poets. You will deem it the very madness of vanity, Mr. Lindsay; but I
could not live without my dreams of literary eminence. I felt that life
would be a blank waste without them; and I feel so still. Do not laugh
at my weakness, when I say I would rather live in the memory of my
country than enjoy her fairest lands--that I dread a nameless grave many
times more than the grave itself. But, I am afraid, the life of the
literary aspirant is rarely a happy one; and I, alas! am one of the
weakest of the class. It is of importance that the means of living be
not disjoined from the end for which we live; and I feel that, in my
case, the disunion is complete. The wants and evils of life are around
me; but the energies through which those should be provided for, and
these warded off, are otherwise employed. I am like a man pressing
onward through a hot and bloody fight, his breast open to every blow,
and tremblingly alive to the sense of injury and the feeling of pain,
but totally unprepared either to attack or defend. And then those
miserable depressions of spirits to which all men who draw largely on
their imagination are so subject; and that wavering irregularity of
effort which seems so unavoidably the effect of pursuing a distant and
doubtful aim, and which proves so hostile to the formation of every
better habit--alas! to a steady morality itself. But I weary you, Mr.
Lindsay; besides, my story is told. I am groping onward, I know not
whither; and, in a few months hence