rld without seemed discouraging
and sad.

At length the student broke the silence; but his thoughts, which were
wandering and disjointed, were breathed less to her than vaguely and
unconsciously to himself. "Morn breaks,--another and another!--day upon
day!--while we drag on our load like the blind beast which knows not
when the burden shall be cast off and the hour of rest be come."

The woman pressed her hand to her bosom, but made no rejoinder--she knew
his mood--and the student continued,--"And so life frets itself away!
Four years have passed over our seclusion--four years! a great segment
in the little circle of our mortality; and of those years what day has
pleasure won from labour, or what night has sleep snatched wholly
from the lamp? Weaker than the miser, the insatiable and restless
mind traverses from east to west; and from the nooks, and corners, and
crevices of earth collects, fragment by fragment, grain by grain, atom
by atom, the riches which it gathers to its coffers--for what?--to
starve amidst the plenty! The fantasies of the imagination bring a ready
and substantial return: not so the treasures of thought. Better that I
had renounced the soul's labour for that of its hardier frame--better
that I had 'sweated in the eye of Phoebus,' than 'eat my heart with
crosses and with cares,'--seeking truth and wanting bread--adding to the
indigence of poverty its humiliation; wroth with the arrogance of men,
who weigh in the shallow scales of their meagre knowledge the product of
lavish thought, and of the hard hours for which health, and sleep, and
spirit have been exchanged;--sharing the lot of those who would
enchant the old serpent of evil, which refuses the voice of the
charmer!--struggling against the prejudice and bigoted delusion of the
bandaged and fettered herd to whom, in our fond hopes and aspirations,
we trusted to give light and freedom; seeing the slavish judgments we
would have redeemed from error clashing their chains at us in ire;--made
criminal by our very benevolence;--the martyrs whose zeal is rewarded
with persecution, whose prophecies are crowned with contempt!--Better,
oh, better that I had not listened to the vanity of a heated
brain--better that I had made my home with the lark and the wild bee,
among the fields and the quiet hills, where life, if obscurer, is
less debased, and hope, if less eagerly indulged, is less bitterly
disappointed. The frame, it is true, might have been bowed t