worthily called upon by young hearts stricken by degrading fears, and
fainting under a Moloch-inspired dread. Notwithstanding my eccentric
life, I have ever been the ardent, the unpretending, though the unworthy
adorer of the Great Being, whose highest attribute is the "Good." I
have had reason to be so.

The man who has acknowledged his Creator amidst his most stupendous
works, who has recognised his voice in the ocean storm, who has
confessed his providence amidst the slaughter of battle, and witnessed
the awful universality of that adoration that is wafted to Him from all
nations, under all forms, from the simple smiting of the breast of the
penitent solitary one, to the sublime pealings of the choral hymn,
buoyed upon the resounding notes of the thunder-tongued organ in the
high and dim cathedral,--the man who has witnessed and acutely felt all
this, and has no feelings of piety, or deference to religion, must be
endued with a heart hardened beyond the flintiness, as the Scriptures
beautifully express it, "of the nether millstone."

But my _forte_ is not the serious. I am intent, and quiet, and
thoughtful, only under the influence of great enjoyment. When I have
most cause to deem myself blessed, or to call myself triumphant, it is
then that I am stricken with a feeling of undesert, that I am grave with
humility, or sad with the thought of human instability. But, on the eve
of battle, on the yardarm in the tempest, or amidst the dying in the
pest-house, say, O ye companions of my youth, whose jest was the most
constant, whose laugh the loudest? Yet the one feeling was not real
despondence, nor the other real courage. In the first place, it is no
more than the soul looking beyond this world for the real; in the
second, she is trifling in this world with the ideal. However, as in
these pages I intend to attempt to be tolerably gay, it may be fairly
presumed that I am very considerably unhappy, and dull, perhaps, as the
perusal of these memoirs may make my readers.

As such great pains were _taken_, at least by me, in my religious
education, it is not to be wondered at that I should not feel at all
sedentary on the Sunday afternoons after church-time. In fact, I
affected any position rather than the sitting one. But all the Sundays
were not joyless to me. One, in particular, though the former part of
it had been passed in sickening fear, and the middle in torturing pain,
its termination was marked with a h