_at one_ with the place of its existence, panting for something above it, aspiring "beyond the fitting medium of desire." We shall see him inordinately yearning after affection and happiness, yet enveloped, as it were, in a nervous network of sensibility, feelingly alive to every the faintest manifestation of slight, neglect, unkindness,--to all that causes sorrow and pain: we shall see the co-existence of these qualities producing necessarily disappointment and disgust; the very capability of enjoying the good, unfitting him for the endurance of the ill; the power of imagination heightening the beauties of the ideal, the keenness of perception aggravating the defects of the real; the consequent struggles for existence in a wounded spirit between "feelings unemployed," affections unreturned, and the bitterness or apathy they engender--between original benevolence and acquired misanthropy. We shall see the sailor habitually yielding himself to the guidance and authority of others, unhesitatingly acknowledging, and, as a matter of course, complying with, the established relations, laws, and customs of society; submitting without repining, question, or surprise, to the vicissitudes of fortune; patient of hardship, uncomplaining of Circumstance. The poet, from the pride of Mind, accustomed ever to decide for itself, to act and reflect always, obstinately questioning even Destiny and Fate; bidding haughty defiance to their Ruler, or yielding with sullen indifference or gloomy repining; if confessing the necessity of compliance, hardly resigned. We shall find the sailor sustaining his cheerfulness in every situation; the poet, plunging, perhaps from constitutional melancholy, into misery; acted upon by that strong attraction, that irresistible impulse towards the dark and the sad, that capability, strikingly described by himself, of "learning to love despair." We shall see throughout the difference between the continual presence and the comparative absence of consciousness, that power by which Self, rising as it were above itself, makes itself the subject of microscopic observation. In the writings especially, of each, we shall observe the operations of these opposite properties. The sailor writes on, unaware and thoughtless of the effect of what he writes: the poet, in his letters particularly, seems to know intuitively the effect on others of every word he sets down; he reads their thoughts, he hears their remarks as he writes; and this knowledge, so immediate that its effects on his style seem almost unintentional, continually modifies his expressions, giving the appearance of affectation to what is no more than a natural result of his quick perception and extreme sensitiveness. In every action, too, of the poet, important or trivial, the working of this principle, so hard to be discovered in the sailor, is equally evident. He looks always to the effect: nothing seems done solely for itself: the love of admiration, of being remarkable, of