At first I writhed and strained in my bonds, and sometimes would make timid advances to the generous young hearts around me. But the tension always proved too sore; I never maintained the ground I had won, and with a perilous fatalism more and more readily accepted what I deemed inevitable failure. There were among them, I doubt it not now, Samaritans who would have tended my bruised limbs; but then they all seemed to be gliding over the black ice, too happy to stay and lift up the fallen. And bruised though I was, I still rose time and again and moved painfully among them, so that theirs was no culpable or merciless neglect. Yet the end for me was illimitable dreariness; and like Archie in _Weir of Hermiston_, I seemed abroad in a world from which every hope of intimacy was banished. And as with every month the hopelessness of resistance was made plainer and plainer, there came upon me the recklessness of the condemned man who jests or blasphemes to hide his ruth. Overwrought continually by forebodings of coming pain, unstrung by strange revulsions, I would pass from burning wrath to cold despair, a most petulant and undisciplined sufferer. Uniting in one person the physical exuberance of youth and the melancholy of disillusioned manhood, I was deprived of the balanced energy proper to either age, and kept up a braggart courage with the headiest wine of literature. I could not bear the bland homilies of the preachers, but ranged myself with the apostles of rebellion who blew imperious trumpet blasts before the walls of ordered life. Verily the violence of the blasts was sometimes such that the ramparts should have fallen down; and often in my exaltation I already saw them totter, as I strode along reciting the dithyrambs of men who like myself could find scarce a responsive heart-beat in all this throbbing world. Above all I gloried in the declamations of Queen Mab, which sanctioned by high poetic authority the waste of my affections and my moody defiance of life's most salutary law. With these upon my lips I roamed, an absurd pathetic figure, amid the haunts of the Scholar Gipsy, and the wayward upland breezes conspired with my truant moods. And while I sat by my lamp late into the night, I turned the pages of pessimists and cynics, for no principles are dearer to a man than those which allow him to profess contempt for the benefits which he cannot enjoy.