friend on earth. But, by-and-by, you missed the
tenderness of yesterday, and grew drearily conscious that Hollingsworth had a
closer friend than ever you could be. And this friend was the cold, spectral
monster which he had himself conjured up, and on which he was wasting all the
warmth of his heart, and of which, at last - as these men of a mighty purpose so
invariably do - he had grown to be the bond-slave. It was his philanthropic
theory!
    This was a result exceedingly sad to contemplate, considering that it had
been mainly brought about by the very ardor and exuberance of his philanthropy.
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 pit-fall. 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. I have seen him, a hundred times, with a pencil and sheet of
paper, sketching the façade, the side-view, or the rear