Page:Kickerbocker Feb 1833 vol 1 no 2.djvu/23

fit that Truth should now hide herself; and his sleepless pilgrimage towards Knowledge and Vision, end in the pale shadow of Doubt? To his dream of a glorious higher happiness, all earthly happiness has been sacrificed; friendship, love, the social rewards of ambition were cheerfully cast aside, for his eye and his heart were bent on a region of clear and supreme good; and now in its stead, he finds isolation, silence, and despair. What solace remains? Virtue once promised to be her own reward; but because she does not pay him in the current coin of worldly enjoyment, he reckons her too a delusion; and, like Brutus, reproaches as a shadow, what he once worshiped as a substance. Whither shall he now tend? For his loadstars have gone out one by one; and as the darkness fell, the strong steady wind has changed into a fierce and aimless tornado. Faust calls himself a monster, 'without object, yet without rest.' The vehement, keen, and stormful nature of the man is stung into fury, as he thinks of all he has endured and lost; he broods in gloomy meditation, and, like Bellerophon, wanders apart, 'eating his own heart;' or, bursting into fiery paroxysms, curses man's whole existence as a mockery; curses hope and faith, and joy and care, and what is worst, 'curses patience more than all the rest.' Had his weak arm the power, he could smite the Universe asunder, as at the crack of Doom, and hurl his own vexed being along with it into the silence of Annihilation."

"If a naturally romantic country were all that novel writers required in pitching the scene of their fictious narratives, the plot of many a story would be laid in Kentucky. You are quite right, my dear K, in supposing that there is a great deal of romantic and picturesque scenery in the lower and eastern parts of the state, and much to repay the lover of Nature, who is willing to bear fatigue and exposure, for the sake of seeing her untrammeled by the fetters of art. Some admire the court beauty, others the peasant; my own admiration belongs to her who holds a middle station. Such is my taste in nature, I like to see art her hand-