semblance of a duty.  I have, nathless, after a two hours’ reverie, to which this resolve and its preliminaries have formed excellent warp, determined to sacrifice this hallowed time to you.

’It did not in the least surprise me that you found it impossible at the time to avail yourself of the confidential privileges I had invested you with.  On the contrary, I only wonder that we should ever, after such gage given and received, (not by a look or tone, but by letter,) hold any frank communication.  Preparations are good in life, prologues ruinous.  I felt this even before I sent my note, but could not persuade myself to consign an impulse so embodied, to oblivion, from any consideration of expediency.’ * *

* * * * *

’May 4th, 1830.—­* * I have greatly wished to see among us such a person of genius as the nineteenth century can afford—­i.e., one who has tasted in the morning of existence the extremes of good and ill, both imaginative and real.  I had imagined a person endowed by nature with that acute sense of Beauty, (i.e., Harmony or Truth,) and that vast capacity of desire, which give soul to love and ambition.  I had wished this person might grow up to manhood alone (but not alone in crowds); I would have placed him in a situation so retired, so obscure, that he would quietly, but without bitter sense of isolation, stand apart from all surrounding him.  I would have had him go on steadily, feeding his mind with congenial love, hopefully confident that if he only nourished his existence into perfect life, Fate would, at fitting season, furnish an atmosphere and orbit meet for his breathing and exercise.  I wished he might adore, not fever for, the bright phantoms of his mind’s creation, and believe them but the shadows of external things to be met with hereafter.  After this steady intellectual growth had brought his powers to manhood, so far as the ideal can do it, I wished this being might be launched into the world of realities, his heart glowing with the ardor of an immortal toward perfection, his eyes searching everywhere to behold it; I wished he might collect into one burning point those withering, palsying convictions, which, in the ordinary routine of things, so gradually pervade the soul; that he might suffer, in brief space, agonies of disappointment commensurate with his unpreparedness and confidence.  And I thought, thus thrown back on the representing pictorial resources I supposed him originally to possess, with such material, and the need he must feel of using it, such a man would suddenly dilate into a form of Pride, Power, and Glory,—­a centre, round which asking, aimless hearts might rally,—­a man fitted to act as interpreter to the one tale of many-languaged eyes!

    ’What words are these!  Perhaps you will feel as if I sought
    but for the longest and strongest.  Yet to my ear they do but
    faintly describe the imagined powers of such a being.’