we once
were. It is the one sole feature in which self-love becomes amiable,
when, looking back on our past, we cherish the thought of a time before
the world had made us sceptical and hard-hearted!

Glencore warmed as he told of that tranquil period when poetry gave a
color to his life, and the wild conceptions of genius ran like a thread
of gold through the whole web of existence. He quoted passages that had
struck him for their beauty or their truthfulness; he told how he had
tried to allure his own mind to the tone that vibrated in "the magic
music of verse," and how the very attempt had inspired him with gentler
thoughts, a softer charity, and a more tender benevolence towards his
fellows.

"Tieck is right, Upton, when he says there are two natures in us,
distinct and apart: one, the imaginative and ideal; the other, the
actual and the sensual. Many shake them together and confound them,
making of the incongruous mixture that vile compound of inconsistency
where the beautiful and the true are ever warring with the deformed
and the false; their lives a long struggle with themselves, a perpetual
contest between high hope and base enjoyment. A few keep them apart,
retaining, through their worldliness, some hallowed spot in the heart,
where ignoble desires and mean aspirations have never dared to come. A
fewer still have made the active work of life subordinate to the guiding
spirit of purity, adventuring on no road unsanctioned by high and holy
thoughts, caring for no ambitions but such as make us nobler and better.

"I once had a thought of such a life; and even the memory of it, like
the prayers we have learned in our childhood, has a hallowing influence
over after years. If that poor boy, Upton," and his lips trembled on the
words,--"if that poor boy could have been brought up thus humbly! If
he had been taught to know no more than an existence of such simplicity
called for, what a load of care might it have spared _his_ heart and
_mine!_"

"You have read over those letters I gave you about him?" asked Upton,
who eagerly availed himself of the opportunity to approach an almost
forbidden theme.

"I have read them over and over," said Glencore, sadly; "in all the
mention of him I read the faults of my own nature,--a stubborn spirit of
pride that hardens as much as elevates; a resentful temper, too prone to
give way to its own impulses; an over-confidence in himself, too, always
ready to revenge its defeats on t