His restlessness has been alluded to.  He found himself unable to sleep as formerly.  Long after retiring to rest he would lie wide awake, vainly courting the gentle influence that seemed to shun him the more it was wooed.  The rays of the morning sun would sometimes stream into the window before sleep had visited his eyelids, and he would rise haggard, and weary, and desponding.  And if he did sink into slumber, it was not always into forgetfulness, but into a confused mist of dreams, more harassing than even his waking thoughts.  The difficulty of obtaining sleep had lately induced a habit of reading late into the night, and not unfrequently even into the morning hours.  Long after his daughter had sought her chamber, and when she supposed he was in bed, he was seated in his solitary room, trying to fasten his attention on a book, and to produce the condition favorable to repose.  The darkness of his mind sought congenial gloom.  If he opened the sacred volume, he turned not to the gracious promises of reconciliation and pardon, and the softened theology of the New Testament, or to those visions of a future state of beatitude, which occasionally light up the sombre pages of the Old, as if the gates of Paradise were for a moment opened, to let out a radiance on a darkness that would else be too disheartening and distracting; but to the wailings of the prophets and denunciations of punishment.  These he fastened on with a fatal tenacity, and by a perverted ingenuity, in some way or other connected with himself, and made applicable to his own circumstances.  Naught could pass through his imagination or memory, but, by some diabolical alchemy, was stripped of its sanative and healthful properties, and converted into harm.

“Young’s Night Thoughts” was a book that possessed peculiar attractions.  For hours would he hang over its distressful pages, and many were the leaves blotted by his tears.  Yet those tears relieved him not.  Still, from time to time, would he recur to the book, as if tempted by a fascination he could not resist, striving to find, if possible, in the wretchedness of another, a lower deep than his own.  Especially in the solemn hours of the night, when the silence was so profound, he could fancy he heard the flickering of the candles, he read the book.  Then hanging upon image after image of those deploring strains, and appropriating all their melancholy, intensified through the lens of his own dark imagination, he would sink from one depth of wretchedness to another, till he seemed lost away, where no ray of light could ever penetrate, or plummet sound.