Page:Kickerbocker Feb 1833 vol 1 no 2.djvu/13

Faust's curse—it will perhaps be recollected we left him uttering one—was an effusion which we might suppose had been dictated by the very breath of his companion, with the very sulphur of whose lungs it seems to be reeking, and resonant with the voice of the old Adam in his heart, an echo and a token to tell him the dispositions of the speaker are all he could desire. So we may reason—but so he reasons not—he is an indefatigable spirit who still thinks nothing done while aught remains to do. The vices and bad passions of solitude have indeed arrived at their lowest depths; but the world hath lower depths, and he must now plunge his victim into these. He loves, after his fashion of loving, a hermit much, but dissipation more; dissipation, that expressive word, that most pernicious thing, that compendium of all the ways by which a human being can possibly go to—Mephistopheles.

Dissipation! it is the consuming fire, which the fruits of genius, the results of thought and study, and the offspring of early hope and promise, have all passed through to Moloch; it is the category and definition which includes all that is not singleness of purpose, consistency, and perseverance; it is the sieve which we exhaust the springs of our youth to fill, and it divides their precious waters in a thousand streams, and wastes them irretrievably. Through all its varied forms and names it may be traced by its effects; sometimes it is loud and riotous and, so, speedily destructive; sometimes it is gay only, and wide outspread in a great round of unmeaning courtesies and vapid amusements; sometimes with a business-like or studious air, it is full of projects, longings sublime and aspirations high, and the beginnings of ten thousand things that end where they begin; but it is forever the same voracious quicksand swallowing up his life who has no fixed pursuit, who allows himself to mistake the meteor fires that cross his pathway, each in their turn, for pole stars.

In social or in solitary life, in all conditions and pursuits, religious or profane, we walk in this hourly danger; of frittering away our time on many objects, and failing of success in all; for this temptation is a wind the devil blows with-