e dreadful vision would have
stayed me forever in a career which has only grown darker and more
unendurable with every step. I kept on much in the same way, increasing in
length and frequency my ever recurring debauches, until the end of the
school term.

I was well nigh twenty years of age, and from this place went to Cincinnati
to attend college. Here the opportunities to gratify my hereditary
appetite, made keen and sharp, and ever keener and sharper by indulgence,
were all about me. My companions were older and further advanced on the
road to ruin than I. My steps were more swift than ever before to tread the
path which leads surely to the everlasting bonfire. I could not fail to
notice while at college that the most brilliant and intellectual--those
whose future prospects were the most pleasing and bright--were the very
ones who most frequently drowned their hopes, and sapped their strength and
energy in alcoholic stimulants. O, vividly do I recall to mind examples of
heaven-bestowed genius, talent, health, and abilities, sacrificed on the
worse than bloody teocalli of this hideous and slimy devil, Intemperance!
How many master minds, instead of progressing sublimely through the broad,
deep, and august channels of thought, became impeded by the meshes and
clogs of intoxication, and were thus worse than prevented from exploring
the regions of immortal truth! How many dallied with the sirens of the wine
cup, until all power to grapple with great subjects was lost irrevocably!
How many are the instances in the world's history of great minds debased
and ruined by alcohol! Look back and around you at the lives of the
brightest literary geniuses and see how many are under the spell of this
Circe's baleful power! Think of the rich intelligences whose brightness has
prematurely faded and died away in the darkness of alcoholic night! What
hopes has alcohol destroyed! What resolves it has broken! What promises it
has blighted! Think of any or of all these things, and hasten to say with
Dr. Johnson that this vice of drink, if long indulged, will render
knowledge useless, wit ridiculous, and genius contemptible. Oh! how many
lost sons of earth, whose lamps of genius blazed only to light their
pathway to the tomb, might have achieved an inheritance of immortal fame
but for this vice, or disease as it may be.

I write this with a hope that it may be a heeded warning to the
intellectual of earth, not less than the illiterate. The