’It was Thanksgiving day, (Nov., 1831,) and I was obliged to go to church, or exceedingly displease my father.  I almost always suffered much in church from a feeling of disunion with the hearers and dissent from the preacher; but to-day, more than ever before, the services jarred upon me from their grateful and joyful tone.  I was wearied out with mental conflicts, and in a mood of most childish, child-like sadness.  I felt within myself great power, and generosity, and tenderness; but it seemed to me as if they were all unrecognized, and as if it was impossible that they should be used in life.  I was only one-and-twenty; the past was worthless, the future hopeless; yet I could not remember ever voluntarily to have done a wrong thing, and my aspiration seemed very high.  I looked round the church, and envied all the little children; for I supposed they had parents who protected them, so that they could never know this strange anguish, this dread uncertainty.  I knew not, then, that none could have any father but God.  I knew not, that I was not the only lonely one, that I was not the selected Oedipus, the special victim of an iron law.  I was in haste for all to be over, that I might get into the free air. * *

’I walked away over the fields as fast as I could walk.  This was my custom at that time, when I could no longer bear the weight of my feelings, and fix my attention on any pursuit; for I do believe I never voluntarily gave way to these thoughts one moment.  The force I exerted I think, even now, greater than I ever knew in any other character.  But when I could bear myself no longer, I walked many hours, till the anguish was wearied out, and I returned in a state of prayer.  To-day all seemed to have reached its height.  It seemed as if I could never return to a world in which I had no place,—­to the mockery of humanities.  I could not act a part, nor seem to live any longer.  It was a sad and sallow day of the late autumn.  Slow processions of sad clouds were passing over a cold blue sky; the hues of earth were dull, and gray, and brown, with sickly struggles of late green here and there; sometimes a moaning gust of wind drove late, reluctant leaves across the path;—­there was no life else.  In the sweetness of my present peace, such days seem to me made to tell man the worst of his lot; but still that November wind can bring a chill of memory.

’I paused beside a little stream, which I had envied in the merry fulness of its spring life.  It was shrunken, voiceless, choked with withered leaves.  I marvelled that it did not quite lose itself in the earth.  There was no stay for me, and I went on and on, till I came to where the trees were thick about a little pool, dark and silent.  I sat down there.  I did not think; all was dark, and cold, and still.  Suddenly the sun shone out with that transparent sweetness, like the last smile of a dying lover, which it will use when it has been unkind all