Let me hasten through some years.[11] The sunshine of life was gone; in all my desire to conform to the habits of my new career, I found myself incapable of contentment. But the times, that had long resembled the stagnation of a lake, were beginning to be shaken. Rome herself, the prey of conspiracy, gradually held her foreign scepter with a feebler hand. Gaul and Germany were covered with gathering clouds, and their flashes were answered from the Asiatic hills. With the relaxation of the paramount authority, the chain of subordinate oppression, as always happens, was made tighter. As the master was enfeebled, the menials were less in awe; and Judea rapidly felt what must be the evils of a military government without the strictness of military discipline. [Sidenote: His Painful Recollections] I protest against being charged with ambition. But I had a painful sense of the guilt of suffering even such powers as I might possess to waste away, without use to some part of mankind. I was weary of the utter unproductiveness of the animal enjoyments, in which I saw the multitude round me content to linger into old age. I longed for an opportunity of contributing my mite to the solid possessions by which posterity is wiser, happier, or purer than the generation before it—some trivial tribute to that mighty stream of time which ought to go on, continually bringing richer fertility as it flowed. I was not grieved by the change which I saw overshadowing the gorgeous empire of Rome. My unspeakable crime may have thrown a deeper tinge on those contemplations. But by a singular fatality, and perhaps for the increase of my punishment, I was left for long periods in each year to the common impressions of life. The wisdom, which even my great misfortune might have forced upon me, was withheld; and the being who, in the conviction of his mysterious destiny, must have looked upon earth and its pursuits as man looks upon the labors and the life of flies—as atoms in the sunshine—as measureless emptiness and trifling—was given over to be disturbed by the impulses of generations on whose dust he was to sit, and to see other generations rise round him, themselves to sink alike into dust, while he still sat an image of endurance, torturing, but imperishable.