regard them indifferently. I wish I could. I
have reason to believe myself the bearer of a message to many men.
This belief is in itself enough, one would say, to deplete a man of
paltry purpose. I wish to be considered only as the messenger, who
comes and departs, and is thought of no more. The message remains, and
should remain, the only material of interest.

Owing to some peculiarities in the situation, I am unable to delegate,
and do not see my way to defer, a duty--for I believe it to be a
duty--which I shall therefore proceed to perform with as little apology
as possible. I must trust to the gravity of my motive to overcome
every trifling consideration in the mind of my readers; as it has
solemnly done in my own.

In order to give force to my narrative, it will be necessary for me to
be more personal in some particulars than I could have chosen, and to
revert to certain details of my early history belonging to that
category which people of my profession or temperament are wont to
dismiss as "emotional." I have had strange occasion to learn that this
is a deep and delicate word, which can never be scientifically used,
which cannot be so much as elementally understood, except by delicacy
and by depth. These are precisely the qualities of which this is to be
said,--he who most lacks them will be most unaware of the lack.

There is a further peculiarity about such unconsciousness; that it is
not material for education. You can teach a man that he is not
generous, or true, or able. You can never teach him that he is
superficial, or that he is not fine.

I have been by profession a physician; the son of a chemist; the
grandson of a surgeon; a man fairly illustrative of the subtler
significance of these circumstances; born and bred, as the children of
science are;--a physical fact in a world of physical facts; a man who
rises, if ever, by miracle, to a higher set of facts; who thinks the
thought of his father, who does the deed of his father's father, who
contests the heredity of his mother, who shuts the pressure of his
special education like a clasp about his nature, and locks it down with
the iron experience of his calling.

It was given to me, as it is not given to all men of my kind, to know a
woman strong enough--and sweet enough--to fit a key unto this lock.

Strong enough _or_ sweet enough, I should rather have said. The two
are truly the same. The old Hebrew riddle read well, that "out of
st