LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

       a youthful and ardent mind as Florence of Worcester and Simeon of

       Durham, the Venerable Bede and Matthew Paris; and so on to Gregory

       and Fredegarius, down to the more modern and elegant pages of

       Froissart, Hollinshed, Hooker, and Stowe. Infant as I was, I

       presumed to grapple with masses of learning almost beyond the

       strength of the giants of history. A spendthrift of my time and

       labor, I went out of my way to collect materials, and to build for

       myself, when I should have known that older and abler architects had

       already appropriated all that was worth preserving; that the edifice

       was built, the quarry exhausted, and that I was, consequently, only

       delving amidst rubbish.

       “This course of study was not absolutely without its advantages.

       The mind gained a certain proportion of vigor even by this exercise

       of its faculties, just as my bodily health would have been improved

       by transporting the refuse ore of a mine from one pit to another,

       instead of coining the ingots which lay heaped before my eyes.

       Still, however, my time was squandered. There was a constant want

       of fitness and concentration of my energies. My dreams of education

       were boundless, brilliant, indefinite; but alas! they were only

       dreams. There was nothing accurate and defined in my future course

       of life. I was ambitious and conceited, but my aspirations were

       vague and shapeless. I had crowded together the most gorgeous and

       even some of the most useful and durable materials for my woof, but

       I had no pattern, and consequently never began to weave.

       “I had not made the discovery that an individual cannot learn, nor

       be, everything; that the world is a factory in which each individual

       must perform his portion of work:—happy enough if he can choose it

       according to his taste and talent, but must renounce the desire of

       observing or superintending the whole operation. …

       “From studying and investigating the sources of history with my own

       eyes, I went a step further; I refused the guidance of modern

       writers; and proceeding from one point of presumption to another, I

       came to the magnanimous conviction that I could not know history as

       I ought to know it unless I wrote it for myself. …

       “It would be tedious and useless to enlarge upon my various attempts

       and various failures. I forbear to comment upon mistakes which I

       was in time wise enough to retrieve. Pushing out as I did, without

       compass and without experience, on the boundless ocean of learning,

       what could I expect but an utter and a hopeless shipwreck?

       “Thus I went on, becoming more learned, and therefore more ignorant,

       more confused in my brain, and more awkward in my habits, from day

       to day. I was ever at my studies, and could hardly be prevailed

       upon to allot a moment to exercise or recreation. I breakfasted

       with a pen behind my ear, and dined in company with a folio bigger

       than the table. I became solitary and morose, the necessary

       consequence of reckless study; talked impatiently of the value of my

       time, and the immensity of my labors; spoke contemptuously of the

       learning and acquirements of the whole world, and threw out

       mysterious hints of the magnitude and importance of my own project.

       “In the midst of all this study and this infant authorship the

       perusal of such masses of poetry could not fail to produce their

       effect. Of a youth whose mind, like mine at that period, possessed

       some general capability, without perhaps a single prominent and

       marked talent, a proneness to imitation is sure to be the besetting

       sin. I consequently, for a large portion of my earlier life, never

       read a work which struck my fancy, without planning a better one

       upon its model; for my ambition, like my vanity, knew no bounds.

       It was a matter of course that I should be attacked by the poetic

       mania. I took the infection at the usual time, went through its

       various stages, and recovered as soon as could be expected. I

       discovered soon enough that emulation is not capability, and he is

       fortunate to whom is soonest revealed the relative extent of his

       ambition and his powers.

       “My ambition was boundless; my dreams of glory were not confined to

       authorship and literature alone; but every sphere in which the

       intellect of man exerts itself revolved in a blaze of light before

       me. And there I sat in my solitude and dreamed such wondrous

       dreams! Events were thickening around me which were soon to change

       the world, but they were unmarked by me. The country was changing

       to a mighty theatre, on whose stage those who were as great as I

       fancied myself to be were to enact a stupendous drama in which I had

       no part. I saw it not; I knew it not; and yet how infinitely

       beautiful were the imaginations of my solitude! Fancy shook her

       kaleidoscope each moment as chance directed, and lo! what new,

       fantastic, brilliant, but what unmeaning visions. My ambitious

       anticipations were as boundless as they were various and

       conflicting. There was not a path which leads to glory in which I

       was not destined to gather laurels. As a warrior I would conquer

       and overrun the world. As a statesman I would reorganize and govern

       it. As a historian I would consign it all to immortality; and in my

       leisure moments I would be a great poet and a man of the world.

       “In short, I was already enrolled in that large category of what are

       called young men of genius—men who are the pride of their sisters

       and the glory of their grandmothers—men of whom unheard-of things

       are expected, till after long preparation comes a portentous

       failure, and then they are forgotten; subsiding into indifferent

       apprentices and attorneys' clerks.

       “Alas for the golden imaginations of our youth! They are bright and

       beautiful, but they fade. They glitter brightly enough to deceive

       the wisest and most cautious, and we garner them up in the most

       secret caskets of our hearts; but are they not like the coins which

       the Dervise gave the merchant in the story? When we look for them

       the next morning, do

Скачать книгу