om when the first dreams of youth
have been disappointed--a malady in which the intellectual desires are
feeble, the intellectual hopes are few; whose victim, if he has still
resolution enough to learn anything, acquires without satisfaction, and,
if he has courage to create, has neither pride nor pleasure in his
creations.

If I were to sing the praises of knowledge as they have been so often
sung by louder harps than mine, I might avoid so dreary a theme. It is
easy to pretend to believe that the intellectual life is always sure to
be interesting and delightful, but the truth is that, either from an
unwise arrangement of their work, or from mental or physical causes
which we will investigate to some extent before we have done with the
subject, many men whose occupations are reputed to be amongst the most
interesting have suffered terribly from _ennui_, and that not during a
week or two at a time, but for consecutive years and years.

There is a class of books written with the praiseworthy intention of
stimulating young men to intellectual labor, in which this danger of the
intellectual life is systematically ignored. It is assumed in these
books that the satisfactions of intellectual labor are certain; that
although it may not always, or often, result in outward and material
prosperity, its inward joys will never fail. Promises of this kind
cannot safely be made to any one. The satisfactions of intellectual
riches are not more sure than the satisfactions of material riches; the
feeling of dull indifference which often so mysteriously clouds the life
of the rich man in the midst of the most elaborate contrivances for his
pleasure and amusement, has its exact counterpart in the lives of men
who are rich in the best treasures of the mind, and who have infinite
intellectual resources. However brilliant your ability, however brave
and persistent your industry, however vast your knowledge, there is
always this dreadful possibility of _ennui_. People tell you that work
is a specific against it, but many a man has worked steadily and
earnestly, and suffered terribly from _ennui_ all the time that he was
working, although the labor was of his own choice, the labor that he
loved best, and for which Nature evidently intended him. The poets, from
Solomon downwards, have all of them, so far as I know, given utterance
in one page or another of their writings to this feeling of dreary
dissatisfaction, and Albert Duerer, in his "Mel