“What he was is to be discovered through these writings, if it may be found out at all.  What he was is not for me nor for you to know.  It is possible that he may meet with competent judges hereafter, even among men.  Look at this address.”

Clifton handed me a little memorandum relating to the ultimate disposition of the manuscript.  It was to remain for eighty years in the Mather Safe, and was then to be consigned to the occupant of the Chair of Moral Philosophy in the College.

“Say rather to the last minority-candidate for the professorship!” I exclaimed.  “I doubt if the actual winner of that comfortable possession will feel disposed to abandon the market-worth of conventional acquirements, and set forth as a humble student of unpopular truth.”

The minister seemed struck with the suggestion, and made the alteration I had indicated.

The darkest hour of the night had come.  Every sound of human activity had long ago ceased.  It was the quiet time when one may most easily probe an intense experience.  I felt that more was to be known,—­something which the minister longed to tell,—­something to which what he had caused me to read was to serve as a prelude.  I suspected how powerless must have been this sensitive man in the presence of the Idea which he had carried.  Doubtless, in one of his peculiar tendencies, it might prevent all harmonious action,—­it might ever goad the intellect, and crush the heart.  As the confession trembled upon the lips of Clifton, I signified my profound sympathy.  It is an awful moment, when a mature man tries to put off the solitariness of his life.

What was then communicated I can repeat only in the first person.  The pathetic earnestness of the speaker imprinted on my memory the very phrases that he used; there can be few verbal changes as they now flow from the pen.

II.

NARRATIVE OF THE REVEREND CHARLES CLIFTON.

I am indebted for education to a bachelor uncle, who, after our great bereavement, received at his house an infant sister and myself.  I was at that time about twelve years old.  My relative enjoyed a handsome annuity, which he spent with the utmost liberality.  As I was rather a thoughtful, though not very studious boy, it was determined that I should go to college.  I entered with some difficulty soon after my seventeenth birthday,—­an age somewhat later than the average at that time.

Two years before me in college was the class of 18—.  Upon the roll of its fifty-two members stood the name of Herbert Vannelle.  Rich, an orphan, inclined to thought and study beyond the limited academic range of those days, endowed with personal fascinations of a very rare and peculiar kind,—­there seemed only one possible shadow to darken his career.  In his family there had been said to exist a tendency to eccentric independence of action, which vulgarly, perhaps justly, passed for insanity.  His father,