en, and thoughtfully read the first of
the "Resolutions":--

"Resolved, That I will do whatsoever I think to be most to God's glory,
and my own good profit and pleasure _in the whole of my duration_,
without any consideration of time, whether now or never so many myriad
ages hence.

"Resolved, To do whatever I think to be my duty and most for the good
and advantage of mankind in general.

"Resolved, To do this, whatsoever difficulties I meet with, and how many
and how great soever."

Burr read the whole paper through attentively once or twice, and paused
thoughtfully over many parts of it. He sat for some time after, lost in
reflection; the paper dropped from his hand, and then followed one of
those long, deep seasons of fixed reverie, when the soul thinks by
pictures and goes over endless distances in moments. In him, originally,
every moral fatuity and sensibility was as keenly strung as in any
member of that remarkable family from which he was descended, and which
has, whether in good or ill, borne no common stamp. Two possible lives
flashed before his mind at that moment, rapidly as when a train sweeps
by with flashing lamps in the night. The life of worldly expediency, the
life of eternal rectitude,--the life of seventy years, and that life
eternal in which the event of death is no disturbance. Suddenly he
roused himself, picked up the paper, filed and dated it carefully, and
laid it by; and in that moment was renewed again that governing purpose
which sealed him, with all his beautiful capabilities, as the slave of
the fleeting and the temporary, which sent him at last, a shipwrecked
man, to a nameless, dishonored grave.

He took his pen and gave to a friend his own views of the events of the
day.

"Mr. DEAR,----We are still in Newport, conjugating the verb
_s'ennuyer_, which I, for one, have put through all the moods and
tenses. _Pour passer le temps_, however, I have _la belle Francaise_ and
my sweet little Puritan. I visited there this morning. She lives with
her mother, a little walk out toward the seaside, in a cottage quite
prettily sequestered among blossoming apple-trees, and the great
hierarch of modern theology, Dr. H., keeps guard over them. No chance
here for any indiscretions, you see.

"By-the-by, the good Doctor astonished our _monde_ here on Sunday last,
by treating us to a solemn onslaught on slavery and the slave-trade. He
had all the chief captains and counsellors to hear him, and smote