He is now alone. The ties which bound him to existence, cruelly loosened before, are torn for ever by this last, worst stroke. The prospect which before warmed his heart, is narrowed and darkened on every side. The journey of life is before him dreary and comfortless. The weary path of rugged labour remains to be trodden, when the motives of activity and the rewards of exertion have ceased to exist, when the keenness of expectation can no longer be stimulated, and the spirit of enterprize has subsided into sullen indifference. While he ruminates with agony on the past, he cheerlessly looks forward to a gloomy futurity, and his foreboding mind sees, in the ruin of his first and fondest hopes, the nothingness of the visions of imagination, the destruction of the thousand little schemes and prospects suggested by an honest ambition, which the exultation of an heart untouched by calamity had fondly and fearlessly indulged. The recollection of those delusions, which cheated his unsuspecting youth, whispers for ever that safety is alone compatible with apathy, and cases his heart in impenetrable suspicion. A line of separation is drawn between him and his species.
Deceived, insulted, wounded, from that quarter where his heart had treasured up all hope, where his ideas of human excellence had all concentred confidence in mankind, is in his eyes the weakness of despicable folly, or the extreme of desperate madness. The principles of the soul, already unsettled, are soon shaken to their foundation. The milk of human kindness turns fast to gall; while those very passions, that frame of mind, which operated the first delusion, which stamped the features of unbounded friendship, of enthusiastic beneficence, now all subverted, are applied to exalt the violence of the opposite character. Under this stroke the self-love, which might bear up against the common weight of calamity, receives an incurable and rankling wound, over which the soul gloomily broods. The passions of the misanthrope still flaming with violence, tend, as to a centre, to the aggravation of abhorrence and distrust of his species, and he hates with a keenness and acrimony proportioned to the strength of disappointed feeling which marked his entrance into life.
H⸺
The following Imitations of the Ancients, by Milton and Pope, are printed from a Manuscript of Gilbert Wakefield’s, dated Warrington, April 20, 1783.
MILTON’S IMITATION OF THE ANCIENTS.
Book I. l. 594.
As when the sun
In dim eclipse, disastrous twilight sheds
On half the nations—