hich we give to children.
In such a year a king was crowned--a battle was fought; there was
some great disaster, or some great triumph. Of the true progress and
development of the nation whose record is thus epitomised--of the
complicated causes which lead to these salient events--of the animated,
varied multitudinous life which has been hurrying on from epoch to
epoch, the abridgment tells nothing. It is so with the life of each
individual man: the life as it stands before us is but a sterile
epitome--hid from our sight the EMOTIONS which are the People of the
Heart. In such a year occurred a visible something--a gain--a loss--a
success--a disappointment; the People of the Heart crowned or deposed
a King. This is all we know; and the most voluminous biography
ever written must still be a meagre abridgment of all that really
individualised and formed a man. I ask not your confidence in a single
detail or fact in your existence which lies beyond my sight. Far from me
so curious an insolence; but I do ask you this: Reflecting on your past
life as a whole, have not your chief sorrows had a common idiosyncrasy?
Have they not been strangely directed towards the frustration of some
one single object--cherished by your earliest hopes, and, as if in
defiance of fate, resolutely clung to even now?"

"It is true," muttered Darrell. "You do not offend me; go on!"

"And have not these SORROWS, in frustrating your object, often assumed,
too, a certain uniformity in the weapons they use, in the quarter they
harass or invade, almost as if it were a strategic policy that guided
them where they could most pain, or humble, or eject a FOE that they
were ordered to storm? Degrade you they could not; such was not their
mission. Heaven left you intact a kingliness of nature--a loftiness of
spirit, unabased by assaults levelled not against yourself, but your
pride; your personal dignity, though singularly sensitive, though
bitterly galled, stood proof. What might lower lesser men, lowered
not you; Heaven left you that dignity, for it belongs alike to your
intellect and your virtues--but suffered it to be a source of your
anguish. Why? Because, not content with adorning your virtues, it
was covering the fault against which were directed the sorrows. You
frown--forgive me."

"You do not transgress, unless it be as a flatterer! If I frowned, it
was unconsciously--the sign of thought, not anger. Pause!--my mind has
left you for a moment; it is