If Kossuth, for example, would pitch the battlefield of
Hungarian rights within an easy ride of my abode, and choose a mild,
sunny morning, after breakfast, for the conflict, Miles Coverdale
would gladly be his man, for one brave rush upon the levelled
bayonets. Further than that, I should be loath to pledge myself.
I exaggerate my own defects. The reader must not take my own word
for it, nor believe me altogether changed from the young man who once
hoped strenuously, and struggled not so much amiss. Frostier heads
than mine have gained honor in the world; frostier hearts have
imbibed new warmth, and been newly happy. Life, however, it must be
owned, has come to rather an idle pass with me. Would my friends
like to know what brought it thither? There is one secret,--I have
concealed it all along, and never meant to let the least whisper of
it escape,--one foolish little secret, which possibly may have had
something to do with these inactive years of meridian manhood, with
my bachelorship, with the unsatisfied retrospect that I fling back on
life, and my listless glance towards the future. Shall I reveal it?
It is an absurd thing for a man in his afternoon,--a man of the world,
moreover, with these three white hairs in his brown mustache and
that deepening track of a crow's-foot on each temple,--an absurd
thing ever to have happened, and quite the absurdest for an old
bachelor, like me, to talk about. But it rises to my throat; so let
it come.
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