em the better for the
silence and the solitude round him? Let the reader take what reason he
will. I have seen the world, and fought my way through it; have
stumbled, like greater men, have risen, like lesser; have been flung
into the most rapid current of the most hurried, wild, and vivid time
that the world has ever seen--I have _lived_ through the last fifty
years. In all the vigour of my life, I have mingled in some of the
greatest transactions, and been mingled with some of the greatest men,
of my time. Like one who has tumbled down Niagara, and survived the
fall, though I have reached still water, the roar of the cataract is yet
in my ears; and I can even survey it with a fuller gaze, and stronger
sense of its vastness and power, than, when I was rolling down its
precipice.

I have been soldier, adventurer, traveller, statesman. I have been
lover, husband, father--poor and opulent; obscure and conspicuous. There
are few sensations of our nature, or circumstances of our life, which I
have not undergone. Alternately suffering to the verge of ruin, and
enjoying like an epicurean deity: I have been steeped in poverty to the
lips; I have been surcharged with wealth. I have sacrificed, and
fearfully, to the love of power; I have been disgusted with its
possession. I figured in the great Babel until I loved even its
confusion of tongues; I grew weary of it, until I hated the voice of
man.

Every man is born for a special purpose, and with a special passion. The
multitude, possessing both, exhibit neither; they are flung, or choose
to be flung, into the pond, where they float only to perish, like blind
puppies. But there are others who stem the great tide, and are only the
stronger for the struggle. From my first sense, the passion to be known
and felt, nay, at the expense of being feared, was my impulse. It has
been the impulse of all men who have ever impressed the world. With
great talents it is all-commanding: the thunderbolt in the hands of
Jove. Even with inferior faculties, and I make no pretence of mine, it
singularly excites, urges, and animates. When the prophet saw the
leopard _winged_, he saw a miracle; I claim for my powers only those of
the muscle and sinew.

Ambition was the original passion of my nature. It rose before me, as
the sun ascends before the Indian, until its fire drives him to the
shade. I, too, have been scorched, have shrunk, and now I regret my
shrinking. But time deals alike with all. I