eavors to overthrow
these abominations having failed, of flying from "the harsh and
grating strife of tyrants and of foes" and of the high and noble
resolves which inspired him:

"And then I clasp'd my hands, and look'd around;
But none were near to mock my streaming eyes,
Which pour'd their warm drops on the sunny ground.
So, without shame, I spake: 'I will be wise,
And just, and free, and mild, if in me lies
Such power; for I grow weary to behold
The selfish and the strong still tyrannize
Without reproach or check.' I then controll'd
My tears; my heart grew calm; and I was meek and bold.

"And from that hour did I, with earnest thought,
Heap knowledge from forbidden mines of lore;
Yet nothing that my tyrants knew or taught,
I cared to learn; but from that secret store
Wrought linked armor for my soul, before
It might walk forth, to war among mankind.
Thus, power and hope were strengthen'd more and more
Within me, till there came upon my mind
A sense of loneliness, a thirst with which I pined."

The fruits born of this seed are discernible in every line of his
works. While having all reverence for his college companions,
Aristotle, Aeschylus, and Demosthenes, his mind instinctively turns
towards the deemed heretical works of the later French philosophers,
D'Holbach, Condillac, La Place, Rousseau, the encyclopaedists, and
other members of that school. His intellect he furbishes with stores
of logic and of chemistry, in which his greatest love was to
experimentalize; of botany and astronomy, in which he was more than a
mere adept; from Hume, too, whose essay on "Miracles," wrong as it is
in the main on many important points, was one of the alphas of his
creed--and with deep draughts from his great instructor, Plato, of
whom he always spoke with the greatest adoration, as, for instance, in
the preface to the Symposium:

"Plato is eminently the greatest among the Greek
philosophers; and from, or rather perhaps through him and
his master, Socrates, have proceeded those emanations of
moral and metaphysical knowledge, on which a long series and
an incalculable variety of popular superstitions have
sheltered their absurdities from the slow contempt of
mankind."

It is desirable to call attention to the great minds from whom the
student of the early p