deprive yourself of your only consolation in sorrow? When the heart
suffers, does your skill admit any remedy like occupation to the mind?
Yet you abandon that occupation to which your mind is most accustomed; you
desert your career; you turn aside, in the midst of the race, from the
fame which awaits at the goal; you go back from civilization itself, and
dream that all your intellectual cravings can find content in the life of
a herdsman, amidst the monotony of a wild! No, you will repent, for you
are untrue to your mind!"

"I am sick of the word 'mind'!" said I, bitterly. And therewith I
relapsed into musing.

The enigmas which had foiled my intelligence in the unravelled Sibyl Book
of Nature were mysteries strange to every man's normal practice of
thought, even if reducible to the fraudulent impressions of outward sense;
for illusions in a brain otherwise healthy suggest problems in our human
organization which the colleges that record them rather guess at than
solve. But the blow which had shattered my life had been dealt by the
hand of a fool. Here, there were no mystic enchantments. Motives the
most commonplace and paltry, suggested to a brain as trivial and shallow
as ever made the frivolity of woman a theme for the satire of poets, had
sufficed, in devastating the field of my affections, to blast the uses for
which I had cultured my mind; and had my intellect been as great as heaven
ever gave to man, it would have been as vain a shield as mine against the
shaft that bad lodged in my heart. While I had, indeed, been preparing my
reason and my fortitude to meet such perils, weird and marvellous, as
those by which tales round the winter fireside scare the credulous child,
a contrivance--so vulgar and hackneyed that not a day passes but what some
hearth is vexed by an anonymous libel--had wrought a calamity more dread
than aught which my dark guess into the Shadow-Land unpierced by