deadliest and surest of human tempters; nursing through all calamity
the love of species, and the warmer and closer affections of private
ties; sacrificing no duty, resisting all sin; and amidst every horror
and every humiliation, feeding the still and bright light of that
genius which, like the lamp of the fabulist, though it may waste
itself for years amidst the depths of solitude, and the silence of the
tomb, shall live and burn immortal and undimmed, when all around it is
rottenness and decay!

And yet I confess that it is a painful and bitter task to record the
humiliations, the wearing, petty, stinging humiliations, of Poverty;
to count the drops as they slowly fall, one by one, upon the fretted
and indignant heart; to particularize, with the scrupulous and nice
hand of indifference, the fractional and divided movements in the
dial-plate of Misery; to behold the refinement of birth, the masculine
pride of blood, the dignities of intellect, the wealth of knowledge,
the delicacy, and graces of womanhood,--all that ennoble and soften
the stony mass of commonplaces which is our life frittered into atoms,
trampled into the dust and mire of the meanest thoroughfares of
distress; life and soul, the energies and aims of man, ground into one
prostrating want, cramped into one levelling sympathy with the dregs
and refuse of his kind, blistered into a single galling and festering
sore: this is, I own, a painful and a bitter task; but it hath its
redemption,--a pride even in debasement, a pleasure even in woe,--and
it is therefore that, while I have abridged, I have not shunned it.
There are some whom the lightning of fortune blasts, only to render
holy. Amidst all that humbles and scathes; amidst all that shatters
from their life its verdure, smites to the dust the pomp and summit of
their pride, and in the very heart of existence writeth a sudden and
"strange defeature,"--they stand erect,--riven, not uprooted,--a