Page:Edgar Huntly, or The Sleep Walker.djvu/111

 collect and arrange the topics fitted to rectify his gloomy and disastrous perceptions.

Thou knowest that I am qualified for such tasks neither by my education nor my genius: the headlong and ferocious energies of this man could not be repelled or diverted into better paths by efforts so undisciplined as mine; a despair so stormy and impetuous would drown my feeble accents. How should I attempt to reason with him? How should I outroot prepossessions so inveterate—the fruits of his earliest education, fostered and matured by the observation and experience of his whole life? How should I convince him that, since the death of Wiatte was not intended, the deed was without crime—that, if it had been deliberately concerted, it was still a virtue, since his own life could by no other means be preserved—that when he pointed a dagger at the bosom of his mistress, he was actuated not by avarice, or ambition, or revenge, or malice; he desired to confer on her the highest and the only benefit of which he believed her capable; he sought to rescue her from tormenting regrets and lingering agonies?

These positions were sufficiently just to my own view, but I was not called upon to reduce them to practice: I had not to struggle with the consciousness of having been rescued by some miraculous contingency from imbruing my hands in the blood of her whom I adored; of having drawn upon myself suspicions of ingratitude and murder too deep to be ever effaced; of having bereft myself of love, and honour, and friends, and spotless reputation; of having doomed myself to infamy and detestation, to hopeless exile, penury, and servile toil. These were the evils which his malignant destiny had made the unalterable portion of Clithero; and how should my imperfect eloquence annihilate their influence? Every man, not himself the victim of irretrievable disasters, perceives the folly of ruminating on the past, and of fostering a grief which cannot reverse or recall the decrees of an immutable necessity; but every man who suffers is unavoidably shackled by the errors which he censures in his neighbour, and his efforts to relieve himself are as fruitless as those with which he attempted the relief of others.