the paths of life. Long after that date I saw Vivian's letter to my
father; and even his conversation had scarcely prepared me for the
pathos of that confession of a mind remarkable alike for its strength
and its weakness. If born in the age, or submitted to the influences,
of religious enthusiasm, here was a nature that, awaking from sin, could
not have been contented with the sober duties of mediocre goodness; that
would have plunged into the fiery depths of monkish fanaticism, wrestled
with the fiend in the hermitage, or marched barefoot on the infidel with
a sackcloth for armor,--the cross for a sword. Now, the impatient
desire for redemption took a more mundane direction, but with something
that seemed almost spiritual in its fervor. And this enthusiasm flowed
through strata of such profound melancholy! Deny it a vent, and it
might sicken into lethargy or fret itself into madness,--give it the
vent, and it might vivify and fertilize as it swept along.

My father's reply to this letter was what might be expected. It gently
reinforced the old lessons in the distinctions between aspirations
towards the perfecting ourselves,--aspirations that are never in vain,--
and the morbid passion for applause from others, which shifts conscience
from our own bosoms to the confused Babel of the crowd and calls it
"fame." But my father in his counsels did not seek to oppose a mind so
obstinately bent upon a single course,--he sought rather to guide and
strengthen it in the way it should go. The seas of human life are wide.
Wisdom may suggest the voyage, but it must first look to the condition
of the ship and the nature of the merchandise to exchange. Not every
vessel that sails from Tarshish can bring back the gold of Ophir; but
shall it therefore rot in the harbor? No; give its sails to the wind!
But I had expected that Roland's letter to his son would have been full
of joy and exultation,--joy there was none in it, yet exultation there
might be, though serious, grave, and subdued. In the proud assent that