looking
and leaning toward that Eternal Power which governs and guides us;--with
that smile and that leaning, sleep comes like an angelic minister, and
fondles your wearied frame and thought into that repose which is the
mirror of the Destroyer.

----Poor Clarence, he is like the rest of the world,--whose goodness
lies chiefly in the occasional throbs of a better nature, which soon
subside, and leave them upon the old level of _desire_.

As you lie between waking and sleeping, you have a fancy of a sound at
your door;--it seems to open softly, and the tall figure of your father,
wrapped in his dressing-gown, stands over you, and gazes--as he gazed at
you before;--his look is very mournful; and he murmurs your mother's
name--and sighs--and looks again--and passes out.

At morning you cannot tell if it was real or a dream. Those higher
resolves too, which grief and the night made, seem very vague and
shadowy. Life with its ambitious and cankerous desires wakes again. You
do not feel them at first; the subjugation of holy thoughts and of
reaches toward the Infinite, leave their traces on you, and perhaps
bewilder you into a half-consciousness of strength. But at the first
touch of the grosser elements about you,--on your very first entrance
upon those duties which quicken pride or shame, and which are pointing
at you from every quarter,--your holy calm, your high-born purpose, your
spiritual cleavings, pass away, like the electricity of August storms
drawn down by the thousand glittering turrets of a city!

The world is stronger than the night; and the bindings of sense are
tenfold stronger than the most exquisite delirium of soul. This makes
you feel, or will one day make you feel, that life,--strong life and
sound life,--that life which lends approaches to the Infinite, and takes
hold on Heaven, is not so much a PROGRESS as it is a RESISTANCE!

There is one special confidence which, in all your talk about plans and
purposes, you do not give to your father: you reserve that for the ear
of Nelly alone. Why happens it that a father is almost the last
confidant that a son makes in any matter deeply affecting the feelings?
Is it the fear that a father may regard such matter as boyish? Is it a
lingering suspicion of your own childishness; or of that extreme of
affection which reduces you to childishness?

Why is it always that a man, of whatever age or condition, forbears to
exhibit to those whose respect for his judgme