The sensation was not unmixed.  His youthful spirit bounded at the prospect of returning vigour, his warm heart clung round those whom he loved, and the perception of his numerous faults made him grateful for a longer probation; but still he had a sense of having been at the borders of the glorious Land, and thence turned back to a tedious, doubtful pilgrimage.

There was much to occasion this state of mind.  His life had been without great troubles, but with many mortifications; he had never been long satisfied with himself or his pursuits, his ardour had only been the prelude to vexation and self-abasement, and in his station in the world there was little incentive to exertion.  He had a strong sense of responsibility, with a temperament made up of tenderness, refinement, and inertness, such as shrank from the career set before him.  He had seen just enough of political life to destroy any romance of patriotism, and to make him regard it as little more than party spirit, and dread the hardening and deadening process on the mind.  He had a dismal experience of his own philanthropy; and he had a conscience that would not sit down satisfied with selfish ease, pleasure, or intellectual pursuits.  His smooth, bright, loving temper had made him happy; but the past was all melancholy, neglect, and futile enterprise; he had no attaching home—­no future visions; and, on the outskirts of manhood, he shrank back from the turmoil, the temptations, and the roughness that awaited him—­nay, from the mere effort of perseverance, and could almost have sighed to think how nearly the death-pang had been over, and the home of Love, Life, and Light had been won for ever:—­

     ’I am come that they might have life,
      And that they might have it more abundantly.’

The words returned on him, and with them what his father had said, ‘You have had a thread running through your life.’  He was in a state between sleeping and waking, when the confines of reflection and dreaming came very near together, and when vague impressions, hardly noticed at the time they were made, began to tell on him without his own conscious volition.  It was to him as if from that brightening eastern heaven, multitudes of threads of light were floating hither and thither, as he had often watched the gossamer undulating in the sunshine.  Some were firm, purely white, and glistening here and there with rainbow tints as they tended straight upwards, shining more and more into the perfect day; but for the most part they were tangled together in inextricable confusion, intermingled with many a broken end, like fleeces of cobweb driven together by the autumn wind,—­some sailing aimlessly, or with shattered tangled strands-some white, some dark, some anchored to mere leaves or sprays, some tending down to the abyss, but all in such a perplexed maze that the eye could seldom trace which were directed up, which downwards, which were of pure texture, which defiled and stained.