ame
gradually more and more rapt and solitary in my habits; knowledge
assumed a yet more lovely and bewitching character, and every day the
passion to attain it increased upon me; I do not, I have not now the
heart to do it--enlarge upon what I acquired without assistance, and
with labour sweet in proportion to its intensity.

[We learn from a letter of Eugene Aram's, now extant, that his
method of acquiring the learned languages, was, to linger over five
lines at a time, and never to quit a passage till he thought he had
comprehended its meaning.]

The world, the creation, all things that lived, moved, and were, became
to me objects contributing to one passionate, and, I fancied, one
exalted end. I suffered the lowlier pleasures of life, and the charms of
its more common ties, to glide away from me untasted and unfelt. As you
read, in the East, of men remaining motionless for days together,
with their eyes fixed upon the heavens, my mind, absorbed in the
contemplation of the things above its reach, had no sight of what passed
around. My parents died, and I was an orphan. I had no home, and no
wealth; but wherever the field contained a flower, or the heavens a
star, there was matter of thought and food for delight to me. I wandered
alone for months together, seldom sleeping but in the open air, and
shunning the human form as that part of God's works from which I could
learn the least. I came to Knaresbro': the beauty of the country, a
facility in acquiring books from a neighbouring library that was open to
me, made me resolve to settle there. And now, new desires opened upon me
with new stores: I became seized, possessed, haunted with the ambition
of enlightening my race. At first, I had loved knowledge solely for
itself: I now saw afar an object grander than knowledge. To what end,
said I, are these labours? Why do I feed a lamp which consumes itself in
a desert place? Why do I heap up riches, without asking who shall
gather them? I was restless and discontented. What could I do? I was
friendless; I was strange to my kind; I was shut out from all uses by
the wall of my own poverty. I saw my desires checked when their aim
was at the highest: all that was proud, and aspiring, and ardent in
my nature, was cramped and chilled. I exhausted the learning within my
reach. Where, with my appetite excited not slaked, was I, destitute
and penniless, to search for more? My abilities, by bowing them to the
lowliest ta