swift descent
of men who HAVE lived in their own esteem, that there are scores of
thousands breathing now, and breathing thick with painful toil, who in
that high respect have never lived at all, nor had a chance of life! Go
ye, who rest so placidly upon the sacred Bard who had been young,
and when he strung his harp was old, and had never seen the righteous
forsaken, or his seed begging their bread; go, Teachers of content and
honest pride, into the mine, the mill, the forge, the squalid depths of
deepest ignorance, and uttermost abyss of man's neglect, and say can any
hopeful plant spring up in air so foul that it extinguishes the soul's
bright torch as fast as it is kindled! And, oh! ye Pharisees of the
nineteen hundredth year of Christian Knowledge, who soundingly appeal
to human nature, see that it be human first. Take heed it has not been
transformed, during your slumber and the sleep of generations, into the
nature of the Beasts!

Five weeks! Of all the twenty or thirty answers, not one had come. His
money--even the additional stock he had raised from the disposal of his
spare clothes (and that was not much, for clothes, though dear to buy,
are cheap to pawn)--was fast diminishing. Yet what could he do? At times
an agony came over him in which he darted forth again, though he was
but newly home, and, returning to some place where he had been already
twenty times, made some new attempt to gain his end, but always
unsuccessfully. He was years and years too old for a cabin-boy, and
years upon years too inexperienced to be accepted as a common seaman.
His dress and manner, too, militated fatally against any such proposal
as the latter; and yet he was reduced to making it; for even if he could
have contemplated the being set down in America totally without money,
he had not enough left now for a steerage passage and the poorest
provisions upon the voyage.

It is an illustration of a very common tendency in the mind of man, that
all this time he never once doubted, one may almost say the certainty
of doing great things in the New World, if he could only get there.
In proportion as he became more and more dejected by his present
circumstances, and the means of gaining America receded from his grasp,
the more he fretted himself with the conviction that that was the only
place in which he could hope to achieve any high end, and worried his
brain with the thought that men going there in the meanwhile might
anticipate him