"Perhaps it may be that I am not formed for friendship, that I expect more than can ever be found. Time will tutor me; I am a singular being under a common outside: I am a profound dissembler of my inward feelings, and necessity has taught me the art. I am long before I can unbosom to a friend, yet, I think, I am sincere in my friendship: you must not attribute this to any suspiciousness of nature, but must consider that I lived seventeen years my own confidant, my own friend, full of projects and strange thoughts, and confiding them to no one. I am habitually reserved, and habitually cautious in letting it be seen that I hide any thing." None knew better than himself that the aspirations and feelings of which genius is the parent are often found to be inconsistent with felicity: "Oh! hear the plaint by thy sad favourite made, His melancholy moan, He tells of scorn, he tells of broken vows, Of sleepless nights, of anguish-ridden days, Pangs that his sensibility uprouse To curse his being and his thirst for praise. Thou gavest to him with treble force to feel The sting of keen neglect, the rich man's scorn; And what o'er all does in his soul preside Predominant, and tempers him to steel, His high indignant pride." Nor was he unconscious that the toils necessary to secure literary distinction, when endured by a shattered frame, are in the highest degree severe. How much truth and feeling are there in the Lines which he wrote after spending a whole night in study, an hour when religious impressions force themselves with irresistible weight on the exhausted mind: "Oh! when reflecting on these truths sublime, How insignificant do all the joys, The gaudes, and honours of the world appear! How vain ambition!--Why has my wakeful lamp Out watch'd the slow-paced night?--Why on the page, The schoolman's labour'd page, have I employ'd The hours devoted by the world to rest, And needful to recruit exhausted nature? Say, can the voice of narrow Fame repay The loss of health? or can the hope of glory Lend a new throb unto my languid heart, Cool, even now, my feverish aching brow, Relume the fires of this deep sunken eye, Or paint new colours on this pallid cheek?" What a picture of mental suffering does the following passage present, and how impressive does it become when the fate of the author is remembered: "These feverish dews that on my temples hang, This quivering lip, these eyes of dying flame; These, the dread signs of many a secret pang-- These are the meed of him who pants for Fame!" Like so many other ardent students, the night was his favourite time for reading; and, dangerous as the habit is to health, what student will not agree in his descriptions of the pleasures that attend it?