NUMBER SIX.
'Weak and irresolute is man.' I record a fault of human nature, as well as my own. I resolved and re-resolved, and am the same. Do I not blush while recording this weakness? Alas! I am dead to feeling, as it regards my fellows. I have no communion with the world, now. I pass by, unnoticed and unknown. Still, I have a love for mankind; and I make these confessions, hoping they may prove of use to others. I daily see others in the same predicament as myself, or, if not so far advanced, yet pursuing a course which will inevitably lead them where I now am. Yes! where I am; and what is that state? Solitariness, apathy, disgust, fretfulness, heart-ache; the absence of all the gentle sympathies of life; the death of all domestic affection; the familiarity of the vulgar and low-bred; the sneer of the foolish prosperous man; the contempt of the small thriving gleaner; the neglect of the busy, and the pity of the good. Oh! yes! one comfort yet remains; the prayers of the pious and truly religious.
But to my story. As hope began to fade from the heart of my dear Alice; as she saw I was beyond the influence of her prayers and entreaties; as she began to be acquainted with the real state of my habits; as she began to see, that not even my love for her availed any thing she began to despair. She had involved herself too deeply to retract. Her feelings had acquired the habit of loving me; and indeed, though an idle young man, I do not think it strange that such devotion and tenderness as I sometimes really felt and bestowed upon her, should have awakened some return.
I was well-bred, had a good person, could sing passably well, by myself, write good poetry, and was passionate and hot in my evidences of affection. I was an enthusiast, and women like decided tastes. They feel an assurance, a confidence in your good, quiet, smooth-faced, unexcitable, sensible man, if he be young, especially; but they love life and animation, even though it lead to slight errors. Women know the difficulty of restraining the feelings within the bounds of propriety; they are most open to impressions; the real creatures of feeling, they love feeling in others. They have many struggles with what they wish, and what they ought to do. They estimate in men the ardor of the temptation, as an offset to the fault. Hence they are forgiving.
Women are obliged to keep a constant guard over themselves. They know their own weakness, and self-protection arms them to the task. Many a high-souled woman knows this. When you do find a well-disciplined character in the female form, what a noble one it is! The labor of the undertaking, the education of self-control, has made her great. She is a whole host. Look at her influence in society; see the majesty of her deportment, the easy assurance of her countenance. How common men quail before her! What respect and attention she exacts from the titled profligate, and the talented vicious! She is all that is exalted on earth. There is no beauty to compare with such beauty; no wealth with such charms. She is the nicest workmanship of God; and in her dwells a soul that scatters blessings around her. 'The heart of her husband delighteth in her, and he has no need of spoil.'
Reader, if you are a father, and have seen the son of your hopes, the inheritor of your name, the bearer of your form and features, gradually falling a victim to low vices; if you are a mother, and can trace, in those features now bloated with excess, and in that eye now dimmed with sensuality, the semblance to the babe that drew its earliest food from your pure bosom, and remember that eye upturned to your face as the innocent lay cradled in your arms; if you are a sister, and mourn the ruin of your bed-fellow; or a brother, and seen your playmate in prison, you may form some notion of what the emotions of a fond heart are, when it beholds its stay gone, its prospects blighted, and its love thrown away upon an unworthy object. No! not altogether unworthy, but with just enough of good to keep alive the love, while it mocks all efforts to draw consolation, to answer the chord in her own bosom.
Love wishes its object to be perfect. None can or must compare with its choice. How fondly does woman cheat herself, if she can, into the belief that her choice is fortunate beyond human fortune! I weep—even I, who have not wept for years for my own misfortunes—I weep, as I recall the memory of the tears she shed over my irrevocable ruin. She did know my character, at last, and she predicted, even in spite of her love, all that has happened.
Shall I record that these tears were not a source of pain to me then? They satisfied my vanity. I always reserved reformation to myself, and thought she was mistaken; and these scalding tears, as they coursed down her cheeks, told me that I was beloved. Not even the misery of the object of my affection could prevent a triumph that I had over her—her, the sought-for by many—that I was preferred among a multitude. Is this nature? Was I hard-hearted? Would not any one feel the same? Let the reader examine his own heart, and answer.
CHAPTER XIII.
At this time, and in this very village, there lived a gentleman, in the truest sense of the term, by the name of Edward Lang. He was a man of high family, of aristocratic notions, and thought literature the chief object worthy of pursuit. At the time I saw him, he bore the ills of poverty, the burden of a broken heart, and disappointed hopes. He possessed a well-stored mind, unwearied benevolence, and a Tremaine-like refinement. He had, in the early part of his life, encumbered a large fortune with debts of extravagance, idleness, and folly; and at a subsequent period, lost the remainder in scheming; for he thought that his prëeminence in literature gave him prëeminence in every thing.