 sense, hidden from me; and all the imaginative delight, wherewith it
had been spiritualized, passed away out of my mind. A gift, a faculty, if it had
not departed, was suspended and inanimate within me. There would have been
something sad, unutterably dreary, in all this, had I not been conscious that it
lay at my own option to recall whatever was valuable in the past. It might be
true, indeed, that this was a life which could not, with impunity, be lived too
long; else, it might make me permanently other than I had been, without
transforming me into any shape which it would be worth my while to take. But I
never considered it as other than a transitory life. There was always a
prophetic instinct, a low whisper in my ear, that, within no long period, and
whenever a new change of custom should be essential to my good, a change would
come.
    Meanwhile, there I was, a Surveyor of the Revenue, and, so far as I have
been able to understand, as good a Surveyor as need be. A man of thought, fancy,
and sensibility, (had he ten times the Surveyor's proportion of those
qualities,) may, at any time, be a man of affairs, if he will only choose to
give himself the trouble. My fellow-officers, and the merchants and sea-captains
with whom my official duties brought me into any manner of connection, viewed me
in no other light, and probably knew me in no other character. None of them, I
presume, had ever read a page of my inditing, or would have cared a fig the more
for me, if they had read them all; nor would it have mended the matter, in the
least, had those same unprofitable pages been written with a pen like that of
Burns or of Chaucer, each of whom was a Custom-House officer in his day, as well
as I. It is a good lesson - though it may often be a hard one - for a man who
has dreamed of literary fame, and of making for himself a rank among the world's
dignitaries by such means, to step aside out of the narrow circle in which his
claims are recognized, and to find how utterly devoid of significance, beyond
that circle, is all that he achieves, and all he aims at. I know not that I
especially needed the lesson, either in the way of warning or rebuke; but, at
any rate, I learned it thoroughly; nor
