ncible
self-consciousness and mistrust: surely no lost opportunities of manhood
leave such aching voids as these. In the spring-time of life to feel day
by day the slow erosion of the power of joy is of all pains most
poignant; out of it grow anxieties, premature despairs, incongruous with
fresh cheeks and a mind not yet mature. This misery was mine for those
four years which to most men are the happiest of a whole career, but to
me at every retrospect seem so beset with gloomy shadows that could I
live my life again, I would not traverse them once more for all the gold
of Ophir.

At first I writhed and strained in my bonds, and sometimes would make
timid advances to the generous young hearts around me. But the tension
always proved too sore; I never maintained the ground I had won, and
with a perilous fatalism more and more readily accepted what I deemed
inevitable failure. There were among them, I doubt it not now,
Samaritans who would have tended my bruised limbs; but then they all
seemed to be gliding over the black ice, too happy to stay and lift up
the fallen. And bruised though I was, I still rose time and again and
moved painfully among them, so that theirs was no culpable or merciless
neglect.

Yet the end for me was illimitable dreariness; and like Archie in _Weir
of Hermiston_, I seemed abroad in a world from which every hope of
intimacy was banished. And as with every month the hopelessness of
resistance was made plainer and plainer, there came upon me the
recklessness of the condemned man who jests or blasphemes to hide his
ruth. Overwrought continually by forebodings of coming pain, unstrung by
strange revulsions, I would pass from burning wrath to cold despair, a
most petulant and undisciplined sufferer. Uniting in one person the
physical exuberance of youth and the melancholy of disillusioned
manhood, I was deprived of the balanced energy proper to either age, and
kept up a braggart courage with the headiest wine of literature. I could
not bear the bland homilies of the preachers, but ranged myself with the
apostles of rebellion who blew imperious trumpet blasts before the walls
of ordered life.

Verily the violence of the blasts was sometimes such that the ramparts
should have fallen down; and often in my exaltation I already saw them
totter, as I strode along reciting the dithyrambs of men who like myself
could find scarce a responsive heart-beat in all this throbbing world.
Above all I gloried in