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Untitled Article
Of the immortal masters will I study ; And so imbue my spirit With a sense Of grace and majesty , till it shall grow
Like that which it perceives ! To me far lands , Immortal for their ancient histories , Shall be familiar places : I will seek The Spirit of greatness where the great have dwelt , And left behind eternal memories .
Am I not young , and filled with high resolves ? And like the sell my will shall be supreme ; Man shall not set it barriers , nor shall say , " Thus far , but yet no farther ! " I will on ! Glory and pleasure at the goal I see ,
And I will win them both : pleasure , which crowns Glory with its most radiant diadem—Pleasure , that springs from the proud consciousness Of high achievement , purchased at a price None but the great -would dare to pay for it !
Ere long , dear mother , thou shalt see thy son Among the honourable of the earth . I know not how renown shall be achieved ; But that it shall is my most solemn purpose , And this is my first earnest of success , That without power , heaven gives not the desire !' p . 155—158
This youth becomes a licentious prodigal ; breaks the hearts 01 his mother and of his betrothed by his desertion and excesses ; loses the last remains of his property to a rival , whom he stabs in a paroxysm of revenge and jealousy ; and dies by suicide , while a chorus of celestial spirits chant their wail over a soul f ever , ever lost V
We question the moral truth of this drama . A spirit which had attained to , and which retained , so much of the sense of good as is ascribed to Raymond could not become the entire and final thrall of evil . There was in it the principle of redemption . Nor is he so much the victim of the tempter ' s seductions , or his
own presumption , as of that erroneous education which had generated an infirmity of purpose not akin to such a nature . The author ia partly right and partly wrong on this topic . She says , in the introduction , ' the most perilous of all conditions is to be the son of a widow/— the timid , enervating system of
female government gives the heart a bias towards pleasure , without strengthening it for resistance , or even enabling it to discriminate between good and evil . ' But it is rather the stern and rigorous system of exclusion which p roduces this moral feebleness . And this is intimated in the drama itself to have been the plan of Raymond ' a mother : —
Untitled Article
The Seven Temptation * . 899
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), June 2, 1834, page 399, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse-os.kdl.kcl.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2634/page/17/
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