Page:Sarah Sheppard - L. E. L.pdf/123

 pages? The spirit within me asserts its divine right; I know I am different from those who surround me. Can the gifts of which I am conscious be given to me in vain? It were a mockery of the mind's supremacy did I not believe in my own future."***

"We begin life; how buoyant, how hopeful! difficulties but bring out a healthful exertion, and obstacles stimulate by the resources they call into action. This cannot and does not last; it is not lassitude so much as discouragement that gains upon us; we feel how little we have done of all we once thought that we could do, and still more how little that we have done has answered its intention. This I believe to be experienced in every career, but more especially in a literary one. Necessarily dependent on imagination, feeling and opinion, of how exhausting a nature is both the work and the appeal of literature! Not a volume but has been the burial-place of many hopes, and the graven record of feelings never to be known again!

"Fame is bought by happiness! With what secret sorrow has that praise been received from strangers, denied to us by friends! Nothing astonishes me more than the envy which attends literary fame, and the unkindly depreciation which waits upon the writer; of every species of fame it is the most ideal and apart, and would seem to interfere with no one.****Perhaps—for the divine purpose runs through every aim of our being—the disappointment and the endurance are but sent to raise those hopes above, which else might cling too fondly to their fruition below. Sooner or later dawns upon us the conviction, that the gifts we hold most glorious were given for a higher object than personal enjoyment, or the praise which is of man. We learn to look at the future result, to acknowledge our moral