rid of
the remainder of the evening. I was resolved to meet Mordecai no more;
and the servant who announced that dinner was ready, was sent back with
an answer, that a violent headach prevented my leaving my room. The
headach was true; and I had a reluctance equally true to see the "human
face divine" for that evening at least. There was one exception to that
reluctance, for thoughts had begun to awake in me, from which I shrank
with something little short of terror. There was one "human face divine"
which I would have made a pilgrimage round the world to see--but it was
not under the roof of Mordecai. It was in one of the little cottages on
which I was then looking from my window, and yet which seemed placed by
circumstances at an immeasurable distance from me. It was the
countenance of a stranger--one with whom I had never exchanged a word,
who was probably ignorant of my existence, whom I might never see again,
and yet whom I had felt to be my fate. Such are the fantasies, the
caprices of that most fantastic of things--the the unfledged mind. But I
have not taken up my pen to write either the triflings or the
tendernesses of the heart. I leave to others the _beau ideal_ of life.
Mine has been the practical, and it has been stern and struggling. I
have often been astonished at the softness in which other minds seem to
have passed their day; the ripened pasture and clustering vineyards--the
mental Arcadia--in which they describe themselves as having loitered
from year to year. Can I have faith in this perpetual Claude Lorraine
pencil--this undying verdure of the soil--this gold and purple suffusion
of the sky--those pomps of the palace and the temple, with their
pageants and nymphs, giving life to the landscape, while mine was a
continual encounter with difficulty--a continual summons to
self-control? My march was like that of the climber up the side of AEtna,
every step through ruins, the vestiges of former conflagration--the
ground I trode, rocks that had once been flame--every advance a new
trial of my feelings or my fortitude--every stage of the ascent leading
me, like the traveller, into a higher region of sand or ashes, until, at
the highest, I stood in a circle of eternal frost, and with all the rich
and human landscape below fading away in distance, or covered with
clouds, looked down only on a gulf of fire.

* * * * *

As I sat at my window, gazing vaguely on the sea, then unru