I did not attempt to follow her or write to her; a profound sense of discouragement came over me, and I looked on my acquaintance with her with a sort of remorse. The truth bitterly told by an enemy with a vivid power of statement is a tonic oftentimes too strong for one's power of endurance. I never reflected so seriously on the responsibility which a man assumes, in awakening the slumbering feelings of a woman, and fixing them on himself. Under the reproaches of Caroline's father I could but regard this as a wrong I had done, and which could be expiated only by leaving her to peace in forgetfulness. I resolved that I would never let her hear from me again, till I had fully proved myself to be possessed of such powers of self-control as would warrant me in offering to be the guardian of her happiness. But when I set myself to the work, I found what many another does, that I had reckoned without my host. The man who has begun to live and work by artificial stimulant, never knows where he stands, and can never count upon himself with any certainty. He lets into his castle a servant who becomes the most tyrannical of masters. He may resolve to turn him out, but will find himself reduced to the condition in which he can neither do with nor without him. In short, the use of stimulant to the brain-power brings on a disease, in whose paroxysms a man is no more his own master than in the ravings of fever, a disease that few have the knowledge to understand, and for whose manifestations the world has no pity. I cannot tell you the dire despair that came upon me, when after repeated falls, bringing remorse and self-upbraiding to me, and drawing upon me the severest reproaches of my friends, the idea at last flashed upon me that I had indeed become the victim of a sort of periodical insanity in which the power of the will was overwhelmed by a wild unreasoning impulse. I remember when a boy reading an account of a bridal party sailing gaily on the coast of Norway who were insidiously drawn into the resistless outer whirl of the great Maelström. The horror of the situation was the moment when the shipmaster learned that the ship _no longer obeyed the rudder_; the cruelty of it was the gradual manner in which the resistless doom came upon them. The sun still shone, the sky was still blue. The shore, with its green trees and free birds and blooming flowers, was near and visible as they went round and round in dizzy whirls, past the church with its peaceful spire, past the home cottages, past the dwelling of friends and neighbors, past parents, brothers, and sisters who stood on the shore warning and shrieking and entreating; helpless, hopeless, with bitterness in their souls, with all that made life lovely so near in sight, and yet cut off from it by the swirl of that tremendous fate!