tion. A state of comparative health, mental
and physical with calmer sleep and a more natural exercise of the organs
of vision, succeeded. I have made many attempts at a further reduction,
but have been uniformly unsuccessful, owing to the extreme and almost
unendurable agony occasioned thereby.

"The peculiar creative faculty of the eye, the fearful gift of a
diseased vision, still remains, but materially weakened and divested of
its former terrors. My mind has recovered in some degree its shaken and
suspended faculties. But happiness, the buoyant and elastic happiness
of earlier days, has departed forever. Although, apparently, a
practical disciple of Behmen, I am no believer in his visionary creed.
Quiet is not happiness; nor can the absence of all strong and painful
emotion compensate for the weary heaviness of inert existence,
passionless, dreamless, changeless. The mind requires the excitement of
active and changeful thought; the intellectual fountain, like the pool
of Bethesda, has a more healthful influence when its deep waters are
troubled. There may, indeed, be happiness in those occasional 'sabbaths
of the soul,' when calmness, like a canopy, overshadows it, and the
mind, for a brief season, eddies quietly round and round, instead of
sweeping onward; but none can exist in the long and weary stagnation of
feeling, the silent, the monotonous, neverending calm, broken by neither
hope nor fear."

THE PROSELYTES. (1833)

THE student sat at his books. All the day he had been poring over an
old and time-worn volume; and the evening found him still absorbed in
its contents. It was one of that interminable series of controversial
volumes, containing the theological speculations of the ancient fathers
of the Church. With the patient perseverance so characteristic of his
countrymen, he was endeavoring to detect truth amidst the numberless
inconsistencies of heated controversy; to reconcile jarring
propositions; to search out the thread of scholastic argument amidst
the rant of prejudice and the sallies of passion, and the coarse
vituperations of a spirit of personal bitterness, but little in
accordance with the awful gravity of the question at issue.

Wearied and baffled in his researches, he at length closed the volume,
and rested his care-worn forehead upon his hand. "What avail," he said,
"these long and painful endeavors, these midnight vigils, these weary
studies, before which heart and flesh a