Now, as he sat with his eyes fixed on the two returned manuscripts on his table, his torturing memory passed in review before him the many times his hopes had been equally lost. He was only twenty years of age, yet he had endured so many disappointments! He shook and trembled with a convulsive agony as he recalled poem after poem, odes, sonnets, epics, dramas--he had tried every thing; he had built so many glorious expectations on each as, night after night, shivering with cold and faint with sickness, he had persisted in gathering from his mind, and arranging laboriously, the brightest and most powerful of his poetical fancies, and hoped, and was often almost sure, they would spread broadly, and be felt deeply in the world. But there they had all returned to him--there they lay, unknown, unheard of--they were only so much waste paper. As each manuscript had found its way back to him, he had received every one with an increasing bitterness and despair, which gradually wrought his brain almost to a state of mental malady. By constitution he was nervous and melancholy: the utmost of the world's success would hardly have made him happy; he had no internal strength to cope with disappointment--no sanguine hopes pointing to a brighter future: he was overwhelmed with present failures. One moment he doubted sorely the power of his own genius: and the thought was like death to him, for without fame--without raising himself a name and a position above the common masses--he felt he could not live. Again, he would lay the whole blame on the undiscerning publishers to whom his poetry had been sent; he would anathematize them all with the fierce bitterness of a soul which was, alas! unsubdued in many respects by the softening and humbling influences of the religion of Christ. He had not the calm reflection which might have told him that, young, uneducated, utterly unlearned in the world and in books as he was, his writings must of necessity have a kind of inferiority to the works of those possessed of more advantages. He had no deep, sober principles or thoughts; his thoughts were feelings which bore him on their whirlwind course to the depths of agony, and to the brink of the grave, for his health was evidently seriously impaired by the indulgence of long-continued emotions of misery.