sks, but kept me from famine:--was this to be my lot for
ever? And all the while, I was thus grinding down my soul in order
to satisfy the vile physical wants, what golden hours, what glorious
advantages, what openings into new heavens of science, what chances of
illumining mankind were for ever lost to me! Sometimes when the young,
whom I taught some elementary, all-unheeded, initiations into knowledge,
came around me; when they looked me in the face with their laughing
eyes; when, for they all loved me, they told me their little pleasures
and their petty sorrows, I have wished that I could have gone back again
into childhood, and becoming as one of them, enter into that heaven of
quiet which was denied me now. Yet more often it was with an indignant
and chafed rather than a sorrowful spirit that I looked upon my lot; and
if I looked beyond it, what could I see of hope? Dig I could; but was
all that thirsted and swelled within to be dried up and stifled, in
order that I might gain the sustenance of life? Was I to turn menial to
the soil, and forget that knowledge was abroad? Was I to starve my mind,
that I might keep alive my body? Beg I could not. Where ever lived the
real student, the true minister and priest of knowledge, who was not
filled with the lofty sense of the dignity of his calling? Was I to shew
the sores of my pride, and strip my heart from its clothing, and ask
the dull fools of wealth not to let a scholar starve? Pah!--He whom the
vilest poverty ever stooped to this, may be the quack, but never the
true disciple, of Learning. Steal, rob--worse--ay, all those I or any
of my brethren might do:--beg? never! What did I then? I devoted the
lowliest part of my knowledge to the procuring the bare means of life,
and the grandest,--the knowledge that pierced to the depths of earth,
and numbered the stars of heaven--why, that was valueless, save to the
possessor.

"In Knaresbro', at this time, I met a distant relation, Richard
Houseman. Sometimes in our walks we encountered each other; for he
sought me, and I could not always avoid him. He was a man like myself,
born to poverty, yet he had always enjoyed what to him was wealth. This
seemed a mystery to me; and when we met, we sometimes conversed upon it.
'You are poor, with all your wisdom,' said he. 'I know nothing; but I
am never poor. Why is this? The world is my treasury.--I live upon
my kind.--Society is my foe.--Laws order me to starve; but
self-preservatio