uld there be other? Have we not seen him disappointed,
bemocked of Destiny, through long years? All that the young heart
might desire and pray for has been denied; nay, as in the last worst
instance, offered and then snatched away. Ever an 'excellent
Passivity'; but of useful, reasonable Activity, essential to the
former as Food to Hunger, nothing granted: till at length, in this
wild Pilgrimage, he must forcibly seize for himself an Activity,
though useless, unreasonable. Alas, his cup of bitterness, which had
been filling drop by drop, ever since that first 'ruddy morning' in
the Hinterschlag Gymnasium, was at the very lip; and then with that
poison-drop, of the Towgood-and-Blumine business, it runs over, and
even hisses over in a deluge of foam.

He himself says once, with more justice than originality: 'Man is,
properly speaking, based upon Hope, he has no other possession but
Hope; this world of his is emphatically the Place of Hope.' What,
then, was our Professor's possession? We see him, for the present,
quite shut-out from Hope; looking not into the golden orient, but
vaguely all round into a dim copper firmament, pregnant with
earthquake and tornado.

Alas, shut-out from Hope, in a deeper sense than we yet dream of! For,
as he wanders wearisomely through this world, he has now lost all
tidings of another and higher. Full of religion, or at least of
religiosity, as our Friend has since exhibited himself, he hides not
that, in those days, he was wholly irreligious: 'Doubt had darkened
into Unbelief,' says he; 'shade after shade goes grimly over your
soul, till you have the fixed, starless, Tartarean black.' To such
readers as have reflected, what can be called reflecting, on man's
life, and happily discovered, in contradiction to much Profit-and-loss
Philosophy, speculative and practical, that Soul is _not_ synonymous
with Stomach; who understand, therefore, in our Friend's words, 'that,
for man's well-being, Faith is properly the one thing needful; how,
with it, Martyrs, otherwise weak, can cheerfully endure the shame and
the cross; and without it, worldlings puke-up their sick existence, by
suicide, in the midst of luxury': to such it will be clear that, for a
pure moral nature, the loss of his religious Belief was the loss of
everything. Unhappy young man! All wounds, the crush of long-continued
Destitution, the stab of false Friendship and of false Love, all
wounds in thy so genial heart, would have healed