and the sarcasm of her terrible silence.

In these remarks, which we trust our readers have at least been kind
enough to consider worthy of an effort of patience, we have attempted to
connect all genuine intellectual success with manliness of character;
have endeavored to show that force of individual being is its primary
condition; that this force is augmented and enriched, or weakened and
impoverished, according as it is or is not directed to appropriate
objects; that indolence, conceit, and fear present continual checks to
this going out of the mind into glad and invigorating communion with
facts and laws; and that as a man is not a mere bundle of faculties,
but a vital person, whose unity pervades, vivifies, and creates all
the varieties of his manifestation, the same vices which enfeeble and
deprave character tend to enfeeble and deprave intellect. But perhaps we
have not sufficiently indicated a diseased state of consciousness, from
which most intellectual men have suffered, many have died, and all
should be warned,--the disease, namely, of mental disgust, the sign and
the result of mental debility. Mental disgust "sicklies o'er" all the
objects of thought, extinguishes faith in exertion, communicates a dull
wretchedness to indolence in the very process by which it makes activity
impossible, and drags into its own slough of despond, and discolors with
its own morbid reveries, the objects which it should ardently seek and
genially assimilate. It sees things neither as they are, nor as they are
glorified and transfigured by hope and health and faith; but, in the
apathy of that idling introspection which betrays a genius for misery,
it pronounces effort to be vanity, and despairingly dismisses knowledge
as delusion. "Despair," says Donne, "is the damp of hell; rejoicing is
the serenity of heaven."

Now contrast this mental disgust, which proceeds from mental debility,