“Delay not, sinner, till the hour of pain
      To seek repentance:  pain is absolute,
    Exacting all the body, all the brain,
      Humanity’s stern king from head to foot: 
      How canst thou pray, while fever’d arrows shoot
        Through this torn targe,—­while every bone doth ache,
          And the soared mind raves up and down her cell
        Restless, and begging rest for mercy’s sake? 
          Add not to death the bitter fear of hell;
        Take pity on thy future self, poor man,
        While yet in strength thy timely wisdom can;
          Wrestle to-day with sin; and spare that strife
        Of meeting all its terrors in the van
          Just at the ebbing agony of life.”

I have great faith in first impressions of intuitive liking or disliking.  Second thoughts are by no means best always nor even often.  Charity sometimes tries to induce, one to think better of such a person or such a situation than a first feeling shrinks from,—­but it won’t do for long:  the man or the place will continue to be distasteful.  My spirit apprehends instinctively the right and the true; and through life I have relied on intuitions; which some have called a rashness, recommending colder cautions; but these latter have seldom paid their way.  A country parson was right in his diagnosis of Iscariot’s character as that of “a low mean fellow;” and he judged reasonably that all the patient kindliness of One who strove to make such His “own familiar friend” was so much charity almost thrown away, except indeed as to spiritual improvement of the charitable.

* * * * *

It is right that in a book of self-revelations, like this genuine autobiography, some special recognition should be made before its close of gratitude to the Great Giver of all good, and of the spiritual longings of His penitent.  These feelings I prefer to show after the author’s poetic custom in verse.  Let the first be a trilogy of unpublished sonnets lately written on

    What We Shall Be.

    I.

    “We—­all and each—­have faculties and powers
      Here undeveloped, lying deep within,
      Crush’d by the weight of circumstance and sin;
    Latent, as germs conceal their hidden flowers,
    Till some new clime, with genial suns and showers
      Give them the force consummate life to win: 
    Even so we, poor prisoners of Time,
      Victims of others’ evil and our own,
    Cannot expand in this tempestuous clime,
      But full of excellences in us sown,
      Must wait that better life, and there, full blown,
    In spiritual perfectness sublime
      The prizes of our nature we shall gain,
      Which now we struggle for in vain—­in vain!”

    II.