Falkland | Page 7

of pursuing, I
saw more of the inutility of accomplishing, individual measures. There
is one great and moving order of events which we may retard, but we
cannot arrest, and to which, if we endeavour to hasten them, we only
give a dangerous and unnatural impetus. Often, when in the fever of the
midnight, I have paused from my unshared and unsoftened studies, to
listen to the deadly pulsation of my heart,--[Falkland suffered much,
from very early youth, from a complaint in his heart]--when I have felt
in its painful and tumultuous beating the very life waning and wasting
within me, I have sickened to my inmost soul to remember that,
amongst all those whom I was exhausting the health and enjoyment of
youth to benefit, there was not one for whom my life had an interest, or
by whom my death would be honoured by a tear. There is a beautiful
passage in Chalmers on the want of sympathy we experience in the

world. From my earliest childhood I had one deep, engrossing,
yearning desire,--and that was to love and to be loved. I found, too
young, the realisation of that dream--it passed! and I have never known
it again. The experience of long and bitter years teaches me to look
with suspicion on that far recollection of the past, and to doubt if this
earth could indeed produce a living form to satisfy the visions of one
who has dwelt among the boyish creations of fancy--who has shaped
out in his heart an imaginary idol, arrayed it in whatever is most
beautiful in nature, and breathed into the image the pure but burning
spirit of that innate love from which it sprung! It is true that my
manhood has been the undeceiver of my youth, and that the meditation
upon the facts has disenthralled me from the visionary broodings over
fiction; but what remuneration have I found in reality? If the line of the
satirist be not true, "Souvent de tous nos maux la raison est le pire,"
[Boileau]--at least, like the madman of whom he speaks, I owe but little
gratitude to the act which, "in drawing me from my error, has robbed
me also of a paradise."
I am approaching the conclusion of my confessions. Men who have no
ties in the world, and who have been accustomed to solitude, find, with
every disappointment in the former, a greater yearning for the
enjoyments which the latter can afford. Day by day I relapsed more into
myself; "man delighted me not, nor women either." In my ambition, it
was not in the means, but the end, that I was disappointed. In my
friends, I complained not of treachery, but insipidity; and it was not
because I was deserted, but wearied by more tender connections, that I
ceased to find either excitement in seeking, or triumph in obtaining,
their love. It was not, then, in a momentary disgust, but rather in the
calm of satiety, that I formed that resolution of retirement which I have
adopted now.
Shrinking from my kind, but too young to live wholly for myself, I
have made a new tie with nature; I have come to cement it here. I am
like a bird which has wandered, afar, but has returned home to its nest
at last. But there is one feeling which had its origin in the world, and
which accompanies me still; which consecrates my recollections of the
past; which contributes to take its gloom from the solitude of the

present:-Do you ask me its nature, Monkton? It is my friendship for
you.

FROM THE SAME TO THE SAME.
I wish that I could convey to you, dear Monkton, the faintest idea of the
pleasures of indolence. You belong to that class which is of all the most
busy, though the least active. Men of pleasure never have time for
anything. No lawyer, no statesman, no bustling, hurrying, restless
underling of the counter or the Exchange, is so eternally occupied as a
lounger "about town." He is linked to labour by a series of undefinable
nothings. His independence and idleness only serve to fetter and
engross him, and his leisure seems held upon the condition of never
having a moment to himself. Would that you could see me at this
instant in the luxury of my summer retreat, surrounded by the trees, the
waters, the wild birds, and the hum, the glow, the exultation which
teem visibly and audibly through creation in the noon of a summer's
day! I am undisturbed by a single intruder. I am unoccupied by a single
pursuit. I suffer one moment to glide into another, without the
remembrance that the next must be filled up by some laborious
pleasure, or some wearisome enjoyment. It is here that