If I found my attention moving from heavenly matters, I grew angry with myself, and I renovated my flagging attention with inward ejaculation. I had all the madness of the anchorite upon me in the midst of youthful society, yet without his asceticism, and certainly without his vanity. My studies, of course, were nearly totally neglected, under this complete alienation of spirit, and Mr Root, lenient as he had lately become towards me, began to flog again; and--shall I be believed when I say it?--I have been examining my memory most severely, and I am sure it has delivered up its record faithfully; but yet I hardly dare give it to the world--but, despite of ridicule, I find myself compelled to say, that these floggings I scarcely felt. I looked upon them as something received for the sake of an inscrutable and unfathomable love, and I courted them--they were pleasurable. I now can well understand the enthusiasm and the raptures of that ridiculous class of exploded visionaries, called flagellants. I certainly was in a state of complete oblivion to everything but a dreamy fanaticism, and yet that term is too harsh, and it would be impiety to call it holiness, seeing that it was in a state of inutility,--and yet, many well-meaning persons will think, no doubt, that my infant and almost sinless hand had hold of a blessed link of that chain of ineffable love, which terminates in the breast of that awful Being, who sits at the right-hand of the throne of the Eternal. I give, myself, no opinion. I only state facts. But I cannot help hazarding a conjecture of what I might have been, had I then possessed a friend in any one of my instructors, who could have pointed out to me what were the precincts of true piety, what those of incipient insanity. At that time I had the courage to achieve anything. Let the cold-hearted and the old say what they will, youth is the time for moral bravery. The withered and the aged mistake their failing forces for calmness and resignation, and an apathy, the drear anticipator of death, for presence of mind.