sation for this in the acquisition of finer and more subtle
perception of things hidden from the social, laughing, hurrying world?
So it seems to me, and even though the nicer discernment bring pain, as
it often does--as all refinement must--who would yield it for a grosser
content resulting from a duller vision?

To contemplate the procession that passes daily beneath my window, with
its ever-shifting pictures of sorrow, of decrepitude ill-matched with
want, new motherhood, and mendicancy, with uplifted eye and palm--to
look down upon all this with only a passing sigh, as my worthy but
material fat landlady does, would imply a spiritual blindness infinitely
worse than the pang which the keener perception induces.

There are in this neighborhood of moribund pretensions a few special
objects which strike a note of such sadness in my heart that the most
exquisite pain ensues--a pain which seems almost bodily, such as those
for which we take physic; yet I could never confuse it with the
neuralgic dart which it so nearly resembles, so closely does it follow
the sight or sound which I know induces it.

There is a young lawyer who passes twice a day beneath my window.... I
say he is young, for all the moving world is young to me, at eighty--and
yet he seems old at five-and-forty, for his temples are white.

I know this man's history. The only son of a proud house, handsome,
gifted--even somewhat of a poet in his youth--he married a soulless
woman, who began the ruin which the wine-cup finished. It is an old
story. In a mad hour he forged another man's name--then, a wanderer on
the face of the earth, he drifted about with never a local habitation or
a name, until his aged father had made good the price of his honor, when
he came home--"tramped home," the world says--and, now, after years of
variable steadiness, he has built upon the wreck of his early life a
sort of questionable confidence which brings him half-averted
recognition; and every day, with the gray always glistening on his
temples and the clear profile of the past outlining itself--though the
high-bred face is low between the shoulders now--he passes beneath my
window with halting step to and from the old courthouse, where, by
virtue of his father's position, he holds a minor office.

Almost within a stone's throw of my chamber this man and his aged
father--the latter now a hopeless paralytic--live together in the ruins
of their old home.

Year by year the ri