rrid solitude by adopting and rearing the orphaned sons of old
friends; to whom, when he was himself, he was the most affectionate
and generous of guardians. But even they could not very long endure
him; for, in His adverse moods, he was incarnate Distrust, and, having
conceived a foul suspicion, his genius enabled him to give it such
withering expression that it was not in the nature of a young man to
pass it by as the utterance of transient madness. So they too left
him, and he was utterly alone in the midst of a crowd of black
dependants. We see from his letters, that, while he saw the
impossibility of his associating with his species, he yet longed and
pined for their society and love. Perhaps there never lived a more
unhappy person. Revering women, and formed to find his happiness in
domestic life, he was incapable of being a husband; and if this had
not been the case, no woman could have lived with him. Yearning for
companionship, but condemned to be alone, his solace was the
reflection that, so long as there was no one near him, he was a
torment only to himself. "Often," he writes in one of his letters,

"I mount my horse and sit upon him for ten or fifteen
minutes, wishing to go somewhere, but not knowing where to
ride; for I would escape anywhere from the incubus that
weighs me down, body and soul; but the fiend follows me _en
croupe_.... The strongest considerations of duty are barely
sufficient to prevent me from absconding to some distant
country, where I might live and die unknown."

A mind in such a state as this is the natural prey of superstition. A
dream, he used to say, first recalled his mind to the consideration of
religion. This was about the year 1810, at the height of those hot
debates that preceded the war of 1812. For nine years, he tells us,
the subject gradually gained upon him, so that, at last, it was his
first thought in the morning and his last at night. From the atheism
upon which he had formerly plumed himself, he went to the opposite
extreme. For a long time he was plunged into the deepest gloom,
regarding himself as a sinner too vile to be forgiven. He sought for
comfort in the Bible, in the Prayer-book, in conversation and
correspondence with religious friends, in the sermons of celebrated
preachers. He formed a scheme of retiring from the world into some
kind of religious retreat, and spending the rest of his life in
prayers and meditation. Reject