d sunk inextricably into a lower grade of
social life. His whole habits became loose and irregular; his studies
were pursued but by fits and starts; his knowledge, instead of keeping
pace with that of the times, became clouded and obscure, and even
diminished; his dress was meaner; his manners hurried, and reckless, and
wild, and ere long he became a slave to drunkenness, and then to every
low and degrading vice.

His father died, it was said, of a broken heart--for to him his son had
been all in all, and the unhappy youth felt that the death lay at his
door. At last, shunned by most--tolerated but by a few for the sake of
other times--domiciled in the haunts of infamy--loaded with a heap of
paltry debts, and pursued by the hounds of the law, the fear of a prison
drove him mad, and his whole mind was utterly and hopelessly overthrown.
A few of the friends of his boyhood raised a subscription in his
behoof--and within the gloom of these woods he has been shrouded for
many years, but not unvisited once or twice a summer by some one, who
knew, loved, and admired him in the morning of that genius that long
before its meridian brightness had been so fatally eclipsed.

And can it be in cold and unimpassioned words like these that we thus
speak of Thee and thy doom, thou Soul of fire, and once the brightest of
the free, privileged by nature to walk along the mountain-ranges, and
mix their spirits with the stars! Can it be that all thy glorious
aspirations, by thyself forgotten, have no dwelling-place in the memory
of one who loved thee so well, and had his deepest affection so
profoundly returned! Thine was a heart once tremblingly alive to all the
noblest and finest sympathies of our nature, and the humblest human
sensibilities became beautiful when tinged by the light of thy
imagination. Thy genius invested the most ordinary objects with a charm
not their own; and the vision it created thy lips were eloquent to
disclose. What although thy poor old father died, because by thy hand
all his hopes were shivered, and for thy sake poverty stripped even the
coverlet from his dying-bed--yet we feel as if some dreadful destiny,
rather than thy own crime, blinded thee to his fast decay, and closed
thine ears in deafness to his beseeching prayer. Oh! charge not to
creatures such as we all the fearful consequences of our misconduct and
evil ways! We break hearts we would die to heal--and hurry on towards
the grave those whom to save we