arth."

"Were I to begin life again," he said, in the same memorandum, "I don't
think I would change any thing in mine." A proof that, without
understanding why or wherefore, he felt our life on earth to be but the
beginning of one which is to be continued in another sphere, under the
rule of Him whose gentle hand can be traced in all things created. For
the same reason he was reconciled to the injustice of mankind, believing
this life to be a trial, and bearing it with noble courage and
fortitude. This mental resignation, however, did not prevent his
suffering bitterly in a moral sense. All pleasure became a pain to him
at the sight of the sufferings of others. He declared on one occasion,
at Cephalonia, that if every body was to be damned, and he alone to be
saved, he would prefer being damned with the rest. This excess of
generosity may have appeared eccentric, but can scarcely seem too
exaggerated to those who knew him. Certain it is, that to witness the
sufferings of others with resignation, appeared to him to be egotism,
and to evince a coldheartedness, which would have been unpardonable in
his eyes. Sometimes even the energy of his writings, dictated, as they
were, by his great generosity of heart, appeared as the revolt of a
noble nature against the miseries of humanity.

In such a frame of mind was he when he wrote "Cain," at Ravenna, in the
midst of people who were for the most part unjustly proscribed, and in
the midst of sufferings which he always tried to alleviate.

Did he deserve the appellation of skeptic, because he despised that vain
philosophy which believes it can explain all things, even God's nature
itself, by the sole force of reason? or because, while respecting the
dogmas proclaimed by our reason and our conscience, he preferred to
follow the principles of a philosophy that argues with diffidence, and
humbly owns its inability to explain all things, and which caused him to
exclaim in "Don Juan"--

"For me, I know naught; nothing I deny,
Admit, reject, contemn: and what know you,
Except, perhaps, that you were born to die?"

But to whom were these lines addressed? To those metaphysicians, of
course, whom he would also have denominated "men who know nothing, but
who, among the truths which they ignore, ignore their own ignorance
most,"--to those arrogant minds who wish to fathom even the ways which
God has kept back from us, and who, in seeking to know the wherefore of
all things in