Sad, indeed, but by no means unusual: he had taught
his benevolence to pour its warm tide exclusively through one channel;
so that there was nothing to spare for other great manifestations of
love to man, nor scarcely for the nutriment of individual attachments,
unless they could minister in some way to the terrible egotism which
he mistook for an angel of God. Had Hollingsworth's education been
more enlarged, he might not so inevitably have stumbled into this
pitfall. But this identical pursuit had educated him. He knew
absolutely nothing, except in a single direction, where he had
thought so energetically, and felt to such a depth, that no doubt the
entire reason and justice of the universe appeared to be concentrated
thitherward.
It is my private opinion that, at this period of his life,
Hollingsworth was fast going mad; and, as with other crazy people
(among whom I include humorists of every degree), it required all the
constancy of friendship to restrain his associates from pronouncing
him an intolerable bore. Such prolonged fiddling upon one
string--such multiform presentation of one idea! His specific object
(of which he made the public more than sufficiently aware, through
the medium of lectures and pamphlets) was to obtain funds for the
construction of an edifice, with a sort of collegiate endowment. On
this foundation he purposed to devote himself and a few disciples to
the reform and mental culture of our criminal brethren. His
visionary edifice was Hollingsworth's one castle in the air; it was
the material type in which his philanthropic dream strove to embody
itself; and he made the scheme more definite, and caught hold of it
the more strongly, and kept his clutch the more pertinaciously, by
rendering it visible to the bodily eye.
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