al blackness, prevented her from calmly and wisely striving
to place her son in some position by which he could have aided in
supporting himself and her. As a child, Andrew was shy and solitary,
caring little for the society of children of his own years, and taking
refuge from the never-ceasing violence of his mother's temper in the
privacy of his own poor bedroom, with some old book which he had
contrived to borrow, or with his pen, for he was a writer of verses from
an early age.

Andrew was small-sized, sickly, emaciated, and feeble in frame; his mind
had much of the hereditary weakness visible in his mother; his
imagination and his passions were strong, and easily excited to such a
pitch as to overwhelm for the moment his reason. With a little-exercised
and somewhat defective judgment; with no knowledge of the world; with
few books; with a want of that tact possessed by some intellects, of
knowing and turning to account the tendencies of the age in literature,
it was hardly to be expected that Andrew would soon succeed as a poet,
though his imagination was powerful, and there was pathos and even
occasional sublimity in his poetry. For five long years he had been
toiling and striving without any success whatever in his vocation, in
the way of realizing either fame or emolument.

Now, as he sat with his eyes fixed on the two returned manuscripts on
his table, his torturing memory passed in review before him the many
times his hopes had been equally lost. He was only twenty years of age,
yet he had endured so many disappointments! He shook and trembled with a
convulsive agony as he recalled poem after poem, odes, sonnets, epics,
dramas--he had tried every thing; he had built so many glorious
expectations on each as, night after night, shivering with cold and
faint with sickness, he had persisted in gathering from his mind, and
arranging laboriously, the brightest and most powerful of his poetical
fancies, and hoped, and was often almost sure, they would spread
broadly, and be felt deeply in the world. But there they had all
returned to him--there they lay, unknown, unheard of--they were only so
much waste paper.

As each manuscript had found its way back to him, he had received every
one with an increasing bitterness and despair, which gradually wrought
his brain almost to a state of mental malady. By constitution he was
nervous and melancholy: the utmost of the world's success would hardly
have made him happy; he h