owers,--they derive their sweetness and
their bloom from the soil in which they grow: some, budding in joy and
gladness, amid the tinkling plash of a glittering fountain, live on ever
bright and beautiful; others, struggling on amid thorns and wild
weeds, overshadowed by gloom, preserve their early impressions to the
last,--their very sweetness tells of sadness.

To conquer the memory of this hopeless passion, I tried a hundred ways.
I endeavored, by giving myself up to the duties of a country gentleman,
to become absorbed in all the cares and pursuits which had such interest
for my neighbors. Failing in this, I became a sportsman; I kept horses
and dogs, and entered, with all the zest mere determination can impart,
upon that life of manly exertion, so full of pleasure to thousands. But
here again without succeeding.

I went into society; but soon retired from it, on finding, that among
the class of my equals the prestige of my early life had still tracked
me. I was in their eyes a rebel, whose better fortune had saved him
from the fate of his companions. My youth had given no guarantee for my
manhood; and I was not trusted. Baffled in every endeavor to obliterate
my secret grief, I recurred to it now, as though privileged by fate,
to indulge a memory nothing could efface. I abandoned all the petty
appliances by which I sought to shut out the past, and gave myself up in
full abandonment to the luxury of my melancholy.

Living entirely within the walls of my demesne, never seen by my
neighbors, not making nor receiving visits, I appeared to many a
heartless recluse, whose misanthropy sought indulgence in solitude;
others, less harshly, judged me as one whose unhappy entrance on life
had unfitted him for the station to which fortune had elevated him. By
both I was soon forgotten.

The peasantry were less ungenerous, and more just. They saw in me one
who felt acutely for the privations they were suffering; yet never gave
them that cheap, delusive hope, that legislative changes will touch
social evils,--that the acts of a parliament will penetrate the thousand
tortuous windings of a poor man's destiny. They found in me a friend and
an adviser. They only-wondered at one thing,--how any man could feel for
the poor, and not hate the rich. So long had the struggle lasted between
affluence and misery, they could not understand a compromise.

Bitter as their poverty had been, it never extinguished the poetry of
their lives.