It is then that I feel like the suppliant of the old Babylonian prayer, "one whose kin are afar off, whose city is distant," and all that appears before my sight is one scroll of wrongs which this evil heritage has inflicted upon me. It has made my best years rich in misery; it has cut me off from marriage; it has compelled me, one hating vain complaint, to live querulously in the optative mood. Neither poverty nor sickness could chastise more heavily; for poverty is strong in numbers and sickness rich in sympathy, but diffidence reaps laughter and is alone. When such thoughts win dominion over the mind I could envy what sufferer you will his most awful punishment. For in his agony be sure there is movement and action; his limbs are torn, yet he is dragged onward: by his very writhing in the bonds he confesses his life. But I lie in some dead waste where nothing moves and all is mist without horizon, lost in an abhorred blankness of dismay to which no positive suffering may be likened. Thither comes no fierce provocation to quicken into Promethean scorn; life lies whelmed in blackness unlit by flashes of defiance or the cold splendour of disdain. Empedocles once described his dream of retribution for the last unutterable offence. For thrice ten thousand years the sinner roams estranged from bliss, taking all mortal shapes, wearing with tired feet all the sad ways of life. AEther sweeps him out to Ocean, Ocean casts him naked on the shores of Earth, Earth hurls him upward to the flames of Helios, and he, relentless, spurns the victim back to AEther, that the dread cycle may begin anew. But to be for ever driven in this majestic whirl of change, to receive the chastisement of all elements and survive unbroken for a new revolution of the wheel, this is but an assurance of the very pride of life, it is the charter of an invincible manhood. The doom which in truth befits the unutterable sin is rather the blank pain without accident or period, without point or salience to draw from stunned nature her last energies of resentment. It is well for me that this misery is short-lived, and that either by thinking on that ideal love I know the miracle of the twenty-ninth sonnet, or, struggling with instant effort out of the toils, try to see myself as I appear to others, one who should scorn to sit in thirst when there are wells yet for the seeking.