Page:Edgar Huntly, or The Sleep Walker.djvu/8

viii that he should make choice of a profession; and he selected that of the law, in the study of which he distinguished himself greatly. But this was not his destiny. His heart had other yearnings, which would not be repressed; and when he had fulfilled the stated period with the gentleman to whom he was articled, and was about to be called to practise on his own account, his mind shrank from the responsibility; and, in spite of the remonstrances of his family and friends, he abandoned a profession which he had voluntarily adopted, and betook himself to the more congenial pursuits of literature.

"He had formed," says Mr. Dunlap, "a world of his own, in which he delighted to dwell, and with whose inhabitants he was habituated to commune, to the exclusion of the dull or sordid beings of real life. The conversation which he heard passing among his fellow beings relative to those objects which constituted the sources of their joys and sorrows, appeared 'frivolous chat,' or, as doubtless it often was, the offspring of 'folly, ignorance, and cupidity.' Society was to him solitude, and in solitude he found delightful converse. It was this shrinking from society, this solitude, this wrong estimate of the views, motives, and characters of mankind, which wrought so powerfully upon the mind of Brown, as to make him turn aside from the obvious path which led to competence, honour, and self-approbation.

"To support himself against the persuasions and arguments of his friends, and against the suggestions of his own better judgment, he resorted to all the sophisms and paradoxes with which ignorance and ingenious prejudice had assailed the science or the practice of the