If I appear indifferent and cold-blooded to the reader, he knows nothing of human nature. There is a point to which a man sometimes arrives, which to all intents amounts to a kind of fatality. Does the drunkard lose his moral agency? Yes! when his faculties are deadened. Is there a man who could resist food, if placed before his eyes just as he was dying of starvation? Is there not a moral deadness of the faculties, produced by habits of idleness and pleasure, equally binding, equally calling for indulgence? Nothing is impossible to God; but man's powers, even in his own favor, are limited; and I am disposed to think, that the vicious man is punished, partly, in this world. He sees, by the examples around him, his certain destiny. He is ever, in his solitary moments, looking over the abyss into which he knows he must fall. He makes effort after effort to escape. It is all fruitless, unless the power of God assist him, as it sometimes does. He is like the sailor standing upon the shattered wreck of his good ship, and looking at the mountain wave approaching, that he knows will engulf him in the deep. Added to this, there are the stings of an upbraiding conscience, and the fear of everlasting punishment.
But there were times when we forgot all unpleasant reflections; when we talked of our prospects of happiness. I was to inherit a fortune—to distinguish myself at the bar. We were to travel over Europe together; perhaps find some delightful retreat in the classic south, and there (I loving only her) we were to spend a life of love and blessedness.
I can hardly believe that she yielded as implicitly to these illusions as I did. I had got myself worked up into a perfect madman; and though at times I knew how false and fleeting were all these plans, yet in her presence, and after talking upon such subjects, my imagination took the reins of my reason, and I made these fanciful excursions with sincerity, and took a pleasure in the anticipation more than equal, I am convinced, to any they could have afforded in reality. I do not think she felt with me here. As I remember her, with her strong sense, her conception of the ridiculous, and exaggeration in others, her keen wit and cutting sarcasm, it seems impossible that she should. Nevertheless, every one is conscious of strange inconsistencies of feeling. A scene strikes us to-day with awe and pathetic effect, which to-morrow we pass coldly by. Every thing depends upon the state of the nervous temperament, the attending circumstances, our previous reading, the chain of events. And by the way, this is the chief use of philosophy, that it enables us to look at every thing with an investigating eye, and never to yield to impulse. The mind is taken up in sound reflection, and it has no time to lose itself in the mazes of the imagination. Age, necessity, torpor of the blood, experience, produce the same effects; while youth, and romantic ardor, and the poetical parts of life, run wild, solely from a want of habits of reflection.
It seems, no doubt, a strange inconsistency, that I did not exert myself, if I so loved this noble girl. We must distinguish between passion and affection. The very nature of the first admits of no reflection. The last is all reflection, and quiet yielding of its own convenience for the happiness of the loved object. Passion is the lava of the volcano, which covers up and ruins all things under it; affection is the refreshing shower, the gentle dew, making the pastures green, and the earth glad. A good, well-regulated mind would have done otherwise than I did, but it would likewise have loved otherwise than I did.
I yielded to nature and my temperament. I had not two wills, one to oppose the other; there was not in my nature any thing to oppose my nature. I have all along described myself as a foolish creature of impulse; and I was, and am, and never shall be any thing else.
One night, after some irregularity caused by lovers' quarrel, and the consequent restlessness, which sought relief in pleasure, she was representing to me the consequences of such habits of dissipation, as tenderly as she could, and I was moved by her earnestness to tears. She followed up her advantage, and throwing herself upon her knees before me, she wept, herself, in sobs, for some moments. Then raising her tearful eyes, she begged, she implored, she entreated me, to change my course of life; not to bring ruin upon us both; not to blight our prospects, by such cruel neglect of every honorable pursuit. She seemed to feel that every thing depended upon me; she saw me on the brink of a precipice; she exerted eloquence that might have drawn tears from a statue; and I was earnest, that night, in my resolutions, as I laid my head upon my pillow. But I did not ask assistance from God; and herein lay my error.
I have since found, that all resolutions are futile and useless, unless we confirm and strengthen them by prayer. The very exercise of prayer is its own answer. Prostration of ourselves before God produces a calm and dispassionate frame of mind, and a sense of our accountability. As our thoughts, in such seasons, dwell upon the truth of an eternal existence, the world and its vanities recede, and appear in their true insignificance. We then are prepared to take the first steps in goodness. Who that has passed out of a life of vice into a life of virtue, ever turns back? The first step is the important one. Let that be taken, in good faith, and each succeeding one opens wider and wider the peace of the path of virtue.
[THE BLUE BIRD.]
Sweet bird! how gladly thy cerulean wing
Opens o'er all the loveliness of spring;
As thy slow shadow, sailing far on high,
Tells me the 'time of birds' is drawing nigh.
Perchance the down of that pure azure breast
On trees of Italy was lately prest;
Or mid the ivy of the crumbled fane,
Thy nest was sheltered from the sparkling rain:
Till to thy heart a whisper, as from home,
Told thee of melting snows, and bade thee 'come!'