under the urgency of this passion. All his might in the
chase--all pride of speed, and strength, and skill--all thoughts of long
and hard endurance--all images of perils past--all remembrances and all
foresight--are gathered on that one strong and keen desire--are bound
down to the sense of that one bitter animal want. These feelings
recurring day by day in the sole toil of his life, bring upon his soul a
vehemence and power of desire in this object, of which we can have no
conception, till he becomes subjected to hunger as to a mighty animal
passion--a passion such as it rages in those fierce animal kinds which
it drives with such ferocity on their prey. He knows hunger as the wolf
knows it--he goes forth with his burning heart, like the tiger to lap
blood. But turn to man in another condition to which he has been brought
by the very agency of his physical on his intellectual and moral being!
How far removed is he now from that daily contention with such evils as
these! How much does he feel himself assured against them by belonging
to the great confederacy of social life! How much is it veiled from his
eyes by the many artificial circumstances in which the satisfaction of
the want is involved! The work in which he labours the whole day--on
which his eyes are fixed and his hands toil--is something altogether
unconnected with his own wants--connected with distant wants and
purposes of a thousand other men in which he has no participation. And
as far as it is a work of skill, he has to fix his mind on objects and
purposes so totally removed from himself, that they all tend still more
to sever his thoughts from his own necessities; and thus it is that
civilisation raises his moral character, when it protects almost every
human being in a country from that subjection to this passion, to which
even noble tribes are bound down in the wilderness of nature.

"It's an awfu' thing hunger, Hamish, sure aneuch; but I wush he was
dune; for that vice o' his sing-sangin is makin me unco sleepy--and ance
I fa' owre, I'm no easy waukenin. But wha's that snorin?"

Yet it is the most melancholy part of all such speculation, to observe
what a wide gloom is cast over them by this severe necessity, which is
nevertheless the great and constant cause of the improvement of their
condition. It is not suffering alone--for _that_ they may be inured to
bear,--but the darkness of the understanding, and the darkness of the
heart, which comes on und