It is pleasant to dwell on this period in the life of young Pym. We think of his home on the far-away island of Nantucket, with the loving mother, the proud father, the doting old grandfather--all cast aside, and probably forever, by the momentary folly of a boy; then of his connection with the ship-mutiny--unquestionably one of the most horrible positions in which it is ever the fate of man to stand; the death of his friend and his friend's father; the shipwreck, and the long, lonely days of watching, in hunger and thirst, for a sail; the final loss of all companions save a gorilla-like half-breed, whose animal instinct of love and fidelity fell about the poor boy like a protecting garment. Then comes this bright spot in his life away in Hili-liland, like a momentary rift in the clouds of a stormy day. For Pym the sun shone with a heavenly effulgence, whilst the obstructions of a dire destiny were for a time removed; but when again the clouds closed between him and the brightness of existence, they closed forevermore. Yet this mere boy, into whose life hardship and danger had introduced more than the experience of most old men, enjoyed, too, what many very aged men never have possessed--what Alexander the Great never possessed--that of which wealth or other source of power seems actually to deprive many men. He enjoyed what was worth more than all that ambition backed by wealth and power can give--that is, the faithful love of a beautiful woman, loved truly in return. This boy was loved by one who was capable with her witching loveliness of satisfying every desire, enthralling the imagination, rousing in the heart that passion which inspires the mind to regions where it throbs in harmony with the Divine, and touches--as might some dying desert-waif with his parched lips a cooling fountain--the very source of love itself. But the most of human love--how debased and debasing, how vile! God, for purposes of His own, links for mankind the Aphroditic passion to the love Divine. The two are separable, and man assuredly separates them. True love may be witnessed as low in the scale of life, and as high, as consciousness is found. We find it in the heart of the faithful animal that dies on a loved master's grave, howling in anguish its life away. And we find it in the purity of woman's heart, where it rests ready for the contact that is to ignite it into illumination forever. Woman herself is divine. Man has placed her everywhere, sometimes behind the barred doors of a harem, sometimes on the throne of empire; but he has not blotted out the divine.