“My ambition was boundless; my dreams of glory were not confined to authorship and literature alone; but every sphere in which the intellect of man exerts itself revolved in a blaze of light before me.  And there I sat in my solitude and dreamed such wondrous dreams!  Events were thickening around me which were soon to change the world, but they were unmarked by me.  The country was changing to a mighty theatre, on whose stage those who were as great as I fancied myself to be were to enact a stupendous drama in which I had no part.  I saw it not; I knew it not; and yet how infinitely beautiful were the imaginations of my solitude!  Fancy shook her kaleidoscope each moment as chance directed, and lo! what new, fantastic, brilliant, but what unmeaning visions.  My ambitious anticipations were as boundless as they were various and conflicting.  There was not a path which leads to glory in which I was not destined to gather laurels.  As a warrior I would conquer and overrun the world.  As a statesman I would reorganize and govern it.  As a historian I would consign it all to immortality; and in my leisure moments I would be a great poet and a man of the world.

“In short, I was already enrolled in that large category of what are called young men of genius,—­men who are the pride of their sisters and the glory of their grandmothers,—­men of whom unheard-of things are expected, till after long preparation comes a portentous failure, and then they are forgotten; subsiding into indifferent apprentices and attorneys’ clerks.

“Alas for the golden imaginations of our youth!  They are bright and beautiful, but they fade.  They glitter brightly enough to deceive the wisest and most cautious, and we garner them up in the most secret caskets of our hearts; but are they not like the coins which the Dervise gave the merchant in the story?  When we look for them the next morning, do we not find them withered leaves?”

The ideal picture just drawn is only a fuller portraiture of the youth whose outlines have been already sketched by the companions of his earlier years.  If his hero says, “I breakfasted with a pen behind my ear and dined in company with a folio bigger than the table,” one of his family says of the boy Motley that “if there were five minutes before dinner, when he came into the parlor he always took up some book near at hand and began to read until dinner was announced.”  The same unbounded thirst for knowledge, the same history of various attempts and various failures, the same ambition, not yet fixed in its aim, but showing itself in restless effort, belong to the hero of the story and its narrator.