ad no internal strength to cope with
disappointment--no sanguine hopes pointing to a brighter future: he was
overwhelmed with present failures. One moment he doubted sorely the
power of his own genius: and the thought was like death to him, for
without fame--without raising himself a name and a position above the
common masses--he felt he could not live. Again, he would lay the whole
blame on the undiscerning publishers to whom his poetry had been sent;
he would anathematize them all with the fierce bitterness of a soul
which was, alas! unsubdued in many respects by the softening and
humbling influences of the religion of Christ. He had not the calm
reflection which might have told him that, young, uneducated, utterly
unlearned in the world and in books as he was, his writings must of
necessity have a kind of inferiority to the works of those possessed of
more advantages. He had no deep, sober principles or thoughts; his
thoughts were feelings which bore him on their whirlwind course to the
depths of agony, and to the brink of the grave, for his health was
evidently seriously impaired by the indulgence of long-continued
emotions of misery.

He took up one of the rejected manuscripts in his hand: it was a
legendary poem, modeled something after the style of Byron, though the
young author would have violently denied the resemblance. He thought of
the pains he had bestowed on it--of the amount of thought and
dreams--the sick, languid headaches, the pained breast, the weary mind
it had so often occasioned him; then he saw the marks of tears on
it--the gush of tears which had come as if to extinguish the fire of
madness which had kindled in his brain. When he saw that manuscript
returned to him, the marks of the tears were there staining the outside
page. He looked fixedly on that manuscript, and his thin face became
darker, and more expressive of all that is hopeless in human sorrow;
the bright light of success shone as if so far away from him now--away
at an endless distance, which neither his strength of body or mind could
ever carry him over.

At that moment the sharp, rapid knock of the postman sounded in his
ears. His heart leaped up, and then suddenly sank with suffocating fear,
for the dark mood of despair was on him--could it be another returned
manuscript? He had only one now in the hands of a publisher; the one on
which he had expended all his powers--the one to which he had trusted
most: it was a tragedy. He ha