t
confidence, forewarned me that if certain symptoms which I then labored
under should ever recur, my case would be beyond remedy, and my life
could not be prolonged many days. Two days since, the first signs of
these became evident; yesterday the appearance became more palpable;
to-day I recognize them in full force. When a man of my age talks of his
approaching death, he only speaks of what has been before his thoughts
every day and every night for years back. Whatever benefit I was ever
capable of rendering my fellow-men in my younger days, I have been
latterly a useless and profitless member of the guild, and for this
reason, that though time had not effaced my powers of intellect, the
energy and the force that should develop them was gone. Without youth
there is no vitality; without vitality, no action; without action,
no success. I often fancied what results might arise if to the mature
thoughts and experience of age were to be added the fire, the energy,
and the passion of youth. If caution and rashness, reserve and
intrepidity, the distrust that comes of knowing men, with that credulous
hope that stirs the young heart, were all to centre in one nature, what
might we not effect? The fate that brought Jasper and myself together
whispered to me that he might become such! I pictured to my mind the
training he should go through, the hard discipline of work and labor,
and yet without impairing in the slightest that mainspring of all power,
the daring courage and energy of a young and brave spirit. To this end,
he should incur no failures in early life, never know a reverse till
it could become to him the starting-point for higher success. And thus
launched upon life with every favoring breeze of fortune, what might not
be predicted of his course?

"He who would stand high among his fellow-men, and be regarded as their
benefactor and superior during his lifetime, must essentially be a man
of action! The great geniuses of authorship, the illustrious in art,
have received their best rewards from posterity; contemporaries have
attacked them, depreciated and reviled them; the very accidents of their
lives have served to injure the excellence of their compositions. But
the man of action stands forth to his own age great and distinguished;
the world on which his services have bestowed benefits is proud to
reward him! and either as a legislator, a conqueror, or a discoverer,
his claims meet full acknowledgment.

"Who would