empted to exclaim, Better had the world never been
created than that one so kind, so harmless, and so mild, should have
undergone such intolerable woe! But it is over now, for, as there is an
end of joy, so has affliction its termination. Doubtless the All-wise
did not afflict him without a cause: who knows but within that unhappy
frame lurked vicious seeds which the sunbeams of joy and prosperity might
have called into life and vigour? Perhaps the withering blasts of misery
nipped that which otherwise might have terminated in fruit noxious and
lamentable. But peace to the unhappy one, he is gone to his rest; the
deathlike face is no longer occasionally seen timidly and mournfully
looking for a moment through the window-pane upon thy market-place, quiet
and pretty D---; the hind in thy neighbourhood no longer at evening-fall
views, and starts as he views, the dark lathy figure moving beneath the
hazels and alders of shadowy lanes, or by the side of murmuring trout
streams; and no longer at early dawn does the sexton of the old church
reverently doff his hat, as, supported by some kind friend, the death-
stricken creature totters along the church-path to that mouldering
edifice with the low roof, inclosing a spring of sanatory waters, built
and devoted to some saint--if the legend over the door be true, by the
daughter of an East Anglian king.

But to return to my own history. I had now attained the age of six:
shall I state what intellectual progress I had been making up to this
period? Alas! upon this point I have little to say calculated to afford
either pleasure or edification. I had increased rapidly in size and in
strength: the growth of the mind, however, had by no means corresponded
with that of the body. It is true, I had acquired my letters, and was by
this time able to read imperfectly; but this was all: and even this poor
triumph over absolute ignorance would never have been effected but for
the unremitting attention of my parents, who, sometimes by threats,
sometimes by entreaties, endeavoured to rouse the dormant energies of my
nature, and to bend my wishes to the acquisition of the rudiments of
knowledge; but in influencing the wish lay the difficulty. Let but the
will of a human being be turned to any particular object, and it is ten
to one that sooner or later he achieves it. At this time I may safely
say that I harboured neither wishes nor hopes; I had as yet seen no
object calculated to call t