ilip,
with reckless vehemence, flung himself, as it were, into its arms. His
was an excitable nature; he had never thought of any one but himself, but
labored with egotistical zeal to cultivate his own mind and outdo his
fellows in the competition for learning. The sullen words in which he
called himself the most wretched man on earth, and the victim of the
blackest ill-fortune, fell from his lips like stones. He rudely repelled
his sister's encouraging words, like a sick child whose pain is the
greater for being pitied, till at last she appealed to his sense of duty,
reminding him that something must be done to rescue her father and
Alexander.

"They also! They also!" he cried. "It falls on us all. Blind Fate drives
us all, innocent as we are, to death and despair, like the Tantalides.
What sin have you committed, gentle, patient child; or our father, or our
happy-hearted and gifted brother; or I--I myself? Have those whom we call
the rulers of the universe the right to punish me because I make use of
the inquiring spirit they have bestowed on me? Ah, and how well they know
how to torture us! They hate me for my learning, and so they turn my
little errors to account to allow me to be cheated like a fool! They are
said to be just, and they behave like a father who disinherits his son
because, as a man, he notes his parent's weakness. With tears and anguish
have I striven for truth and knowledge. There is not a province of
thought whose deepest depths I have not tried to fathom; and when I
recognized that it is not given to mortals to apprehend the essence of
the divinity because the organs bestowed on us are too small and feeble;
when I refused to pronounce whether that which I can not apprehend exists
or not, was that my fault, or theirs? There may be divine forces which
created and govern the universe; but never talk to me of their goodness,
and reasonableness, and care for human creatures! Can a reasonable being,
who cares for the happiness of another, strew the place assigned to him
to dwell in with snares and traps, or implant in his breast a hundred
impulses of which the gratification only drags him into an abyss? Is that
Being my friend, who suffers me to be born and to grow up, and leaves me
tied to the martyr's stake, with very few real joys, and finally kills
me, innocent or guilty, as surely as I am born? If the divinity which is
supposed to bestow on us a portion of the divine essence in the form of
reason w