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 are failing? What have I gained?
I have pushed my researches wide and far; my life has been one long and
weary lesson; I have shut out from me the busy and beautiful world; I
have chastened every youthful impulse; and at an age when the heart
should be lightest and the pulse the freest, I am grave and silent and
sorrowful,' and the frost of a premature age is gathering around my
heart. Amidst these ponderous tomes, surrounded by the vener