Such speculations and opinions, I am sensible, would meet with no favor among us now. The espousal of the slave-man's cause among our Northern people is so humane and hearty that they can stop nowhere, for any consideration of expediency, in doing him justice, after all his wrongs; and I honor their feeling, go to what lengths it will. Nevertheless, I put down these my thoughts, for my children to understand, regard them as they may. But what it is in my style or manner of writing that has called forth such a hard feeling towards me, from extremists both North and South, upon this slavery question, I cannot understand. In every instance in which I have spoken of it, I have been drawn out by a sense of duty,-there certainly was no pleasure in it. I have never assailed the motives of any man or party; I have spoken in no feeling of unkindness to anybody; there can have been no bitterness in my speech. [120] And yet something, I suppose, there must have been in my way of expressing myself, to offend. It may have been a fault, it may have been a merit for aught I know; for truly I do not know what it was. After all, how little does any man know of his own personality,--of his personality in action? He may study himself; he may find out what his faculties, what his traits of character are, in the abstract as it were; but what they are in action, in movement,--how they appear to others,--he cannot know. The eye that looks around upon a landscape sees everything but itself. It is just as a man may look in the glass and see himself there every day; but he sees only the framework, only the "still life" in his face; he does not see it in the free play of expression,--in the strong workings of thought and feeling. I was one day sitting with Robert Walsh in Paris, and there was a large mirror behind him. Suddenly he said, "Ah, what a vain fellow you are!"-"How so?" I asked.--"Why," said he, "you are not looking at me as you talk, but you are looking at yourself in the glass."--"It is a fact!" I exclaimed, "I never saw myself talking before,--never saw the play of my own features in conversation." Had the mind a glass thus to look in, it would see things, see wonders, it knows nothing of now. It might see worse things, it might see better things, than it expected. And yet I have been endeavoring in these pages [121] to give some account of myself, while, after all, I am obliged to say that it is little more than a post mortem examination. If I had been dealing with the living subject, I suppose I could not have dealt so freely with myself. The last thing which I ever thought of doing is this which I have now done. Autobiographies are often pleasant reading; but I confess that I have always had a kind of prejudice against them. They have seemed to me to imply something of vanity, or a want of dignified reserve. The apology lies, perhaps, in the writer's ignorance, after all, of his own and very self. He has only told the story of a life.