It sometimes
came over him painfully that he was never more to be of any importance to
his fellow-creatures. There was nobody living to whom he was connected
by any very near ties. He felt kindly enough to the good woman in whose
house he lived; he sometimes gave a few words of counsel to her son; he
was not unamiable with the few people he met; he bowed with great
consideration to the Rev. Dr. Pemberton; and he studied with no small
interest the physiognomy of the Rev. Joseph Bellamy Stoker, to whose
sermons he listened, with a black scowl now and then, and a nostril
dilating with ominous intensity of meaning. But he said sadly to
himself, that his life had been a failure,--that he had nothing to show
for it, and his one talent was ready in its napkin to give back to his
Lord.

He owed something of this sadness, perhaps, to a cause which many would
hold of small significance. Though he had mourned for no lost love, at
least so far as was known, though he had never suffered the pang of
parting with a child, though he seemed isolated from those joys and
griefs which come with the ties of family, he too had his private urn
filled with the ashes of extinguished hopes. He was the father of a dead
book.

Why "Thoughts on the Universe, by Byles Gridley, A. M.," had not met with
an eager welcome and a permanent demand from the discriminating public,
it would take us too long to inquire in detail. Indeed; he himself was
never able to account satisfactorily for the state of things which his
bookseller's account made evident to him. He had read and re-read his
work; and the more familiar he became with it, the less was he able to
understand the singular want of popular appreciation of what he could not
help recognizing as its excellences. He had a special copy of his work,
printed on large paper and sumptuously bound. He loved to read in this,
as people read over the letters of friends who have long been dead; and
it might have awakened a feeling of something far removed from the
ludicrous, if his comments on his own production could have been heard.
"That's a thought, now, for you!--See Mr. Thomas Babington Macaulay's
Essay printed six years after thus book." "A felicitous image! and so
everybody would have said if only Mr. Thomas Carlyle had hit upon it."
"If this is not genuine pathos, where will you find it, I should like to
know? And nobody to open the book where it stands written but one poor
old man--in this