After this, her manner changed toward me entirely. There was no reserve. She pointed out my faults; she endeavored to excite me to honorable exertion. Often has she ran away from me, to force me to go and study; and if, when I returned, I bore the marks of mental fatigue, how happy it used to make her! She was aware that I might rise to respectability in my profession; but she did not know the cruel negligence of my early life; she did not know the long-riveted habits of idleness I had indulged; she did not know how hopeless and blank my prospects really were.
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.