by extreme
poverty from prosecuting a study which had become the sole passion of
his existence, he had reasoned himself into the belief that it would
be admissible to rob a very dissolute, worthless man if he applied the
money so obtained to the acquisition of a knowledge which he could
not otherwise acquire, and which he held to be profitable to mankind.
Unfortunately, the dissolute rich man was not willing to be robbed for
so excellent a purpose; he was armed and he resisted. A struggle ensued,
and the crime of homicide was added to that of robbery. The robbery was
premeditated; the murder was accidental. But he who would accept some
similar interpretation of Aram's crime must, to comprehend fully the
lessons which belong to so terrible a picture of frenzy and guilt,
consider also the physical circumstances and condition of the criminal
at the time,--severe illness, intense labor of the brain, poverty
bordering upon famine, the mind preternaturally at work devising schemes
and excuses to arrive at the means for ends ardently desired. And all
this duly considered, the reader may see the crime bodying itself out
from the shades and chimeras of a horrible hallucination,--the awful
dream of a brief but delirious and convulsed disease. It is thus only
that we can account for the contradiction of one deed at war with a
whole life,--blasting, indeed, forever the happiness, but making little
revolution in the pursuits and disposition of the character. No one who
has examined with care and thoughtfulness the aspects of Life and Nature
but must allow that in the contemplation of such a spectacle, great and
most moral truths must force themselves on the notice and sink deep
into the heart. The entanglements of human reasoning; the influence
of circumstance upon deeds; the perversion that may be made, by one
self-palter with the Fiend, of elements the most glorious; the secret
effect of conscience in frustrating all for which the crime was
done, leaving genius without hope, knowledge without fruit, deadening
benevolence into mechanism, tainting love itself with terror and
suspicion,--such reflections (leading, with subtler minds, to many more
vast and complicated theorems in the consideration of our nature, social
and individual) arise out of the tragic moral which the story of Eugene
Aram (were it but adequately treated) could not fail to convey.

BRUSSELS, August, 1840.

PREFACE TO THE PRESENT EDITION.

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