and the only result of the experiment was the dissipation of an ideal, the naïve expectation of the vicarious penalty to which I had in my sincerity offered myself having passed away. Convinced, that I had cured her, I was indignant at having cured her for him, but I suffered no visitation of contempt for women, and my indignation was the deepest feeling that remained from the experience, except the literary impulse born of the persistent effort to interest her in my correspondence and the consequent search for material for letters in the details of college life and the nature around us; and the habit of noticing and memorizing what might be of interest to others in the most trivial incidents of life never quite left me. I became a profuse letter-writer from inclination, and, though all the letters of that part of my life and for years after were recalled and burnt scrupulously, I am convinced that what literary ability I possess is in a great degree owing to the impulse I received in that romantic attachment. What was, perhaps, more important, was that the vicarious offering of myself, made in my morbid enthusiasm, and the commonplace result of it, hastened the end of that phase of my religious experience. It was only because my boyhood had been frozen up in those seven years of apathy and began to thaw out in later years, when manhood should have been taking the reins, that all that passage of childhood and unsophisticated devotion intruded in the wrong place, to fill up the void in the formation. My religious status, as well as my conception of life, were only advanced to where they should have been at an earlier period.