features to which they properly belonged, and centred in him. My pride was unbounded: what stood in the way of that pride? It was perhaps but an ill regulated and abortive passion. My temper was reserved and sullen; my speech was slow and sparing; I hardly communi. cated myself to a human creature: what chance had I for popularity and admiration? If all had been smooth and level before me, if no eminence had interposed itself through the vast plain of my existence, my hopes would, very likely, not have been the less abortive. No matter: whatever I was compelled to admire, I was compelled to hate. I was a disappointed and discontented soul; and all the wholesome juices and circulations of my frame converted themselves into bitterness and gall. Clifford was the great luminary of the sphere in which I lived. Every one admired him; every one hung on his accents. He bewitched all that knew him by the nobleness and gallantry of his spirit. He charmed, without a purpose to charm; the walk of his soul was free and unconstrained and graceful; his happiest impulses expressed themselves with such tranquillity, and so without an effort, that you wondered in what their happiness consisted. It is like what we hear described of the benignity of the Deity, that diffuses life and enjoyment every where, and produces the astonishing miracles that even the very "angels desire to look into" and understand, in perfect repose, and is as one, in doing every thing, that does nothing. What then was I? A dark and malignant planet, that no eye remarked, that fain would shine, but that, as long as the sun of Clifford was above the horizon, was cut off from every hope of gratification. At this distance of time I can sit down, and deliberately calculate my small hopes of success, even if Clifford had been removed from the scene. But such were not my reasonings at the moment. It seemed to me, that he was my only obstacle; that he was my evil genius; and that, while my merits were in reality more sterling than his, he always crossed my path, and thwarted my success, and drew off all eyes, not only from perceiving my worth, but in a manner from recognising my existence. Is it not surprising that all this should have ripened into hatred? What enormous and unmeasured injustice! What had I to do to hate him? He never injured me in the minutest article. He never conceived a thought of injury. Yet all my passions seemed to merge in this single passion. I must kill him; or he must kill me. He was to me, like the poison-tree of Java: the sight of him was death; and every smallest air that blew from him to me, struck at the very core of my existence. He was a milstone hanged about my neck, that cramped and bowed down my intellectual frame, worse than all the diseases that can afflict a man, and all the debility of the most imbecil and protracted existence. He was an impenetrable wall, that reached up to the heavens, that compassed me in on every side, and on every side hid me from my fellow-mortals, and darkened to me the meridian day. Let this one obstacle be removed (so I fondly thought), and I shall then be elastic, and be free! Ambition shall once more revisit my bosom; and complacence, that stranger, which, like Astræa, had flown up to heaven, and abandoned me for ever, shall again be mine. In a word, no passion ever harboured in a humau bosom, that it seemed so entirely to fill, in which it spread so wide, and mounted so high, and appeared so utterly to convert every other sentiment and idea into its own substance. END OF VOLUME FIRST. Printed by George Ramsay and Company, |