OR THE THREADS OF LIFE. BY RICHARD B. KIMBALL. “Quicquid agunt homines, votum, timor, ira, voluptas, THIRD, EDITION. NEW YORK: GEORGE P. PUTNAM, 155 BROADWAY. 1850. Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1849, By G. P. PUTNAM, in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the United States, in and for the Southern District of New York. STEREOTYPED BY C. C. SAVAGE, 13 Chambers Street, N. Y. At the age of twenty-three years I find myself upon the threshold of two worlds. The PAST summons the thousand incidents which have operated to determine me as a responsible being, and presents them before me, with fearful vividness. The PRESENT seems like nothing beneath my feet. And the FUTURE, no longer a shadowy dream, throws open its endless vista, and whispers that I must soon enter upon all its untried, unknown realities. Here I am permitted to pause a moment, ere I commence upon that new existence which ends only with the INFINITE. I have finished my life upon earth. The ties which connect me with the world have parted. I have to do now only with eternity. Yet something which I may not resist, impels me to retrospection. I look back over my short pilgrimage, and feel a yearning which I can not restrain, to put down a narrative of my brief existence, and to mark the several changes which have come over my spirit, in the hope that the young, with whom I chiefly sympathize, may profit by the recital. But what will this avail to youthful spirits, flushed with the glow of health, secure in their fancied strength, determined on enjoyment? To them the world is everything. Alas, they know not that the world will reward them with infamy, if they trust alone to it! Yet it is to such I make my appeal. I would arrest them, before they cease to have sympathy with every saving influence, because of their habitual opposition to it. But I will not anticipate the moral of my life. Let this be gathered from the record of it. 462759 BOOK I. Οὐδὲν ἔμπεδον, αλλ' όπως ἐς κυκεώνα πάντα συνειλέονται, και ἐστι τώϋτὸ τέρψις ἀτερψίη, γνῶσις ἀγνωσίη, μέγα μικρόν, ἄνω κάτω περιχορεύοντα, καὶ ἀμειβόμενα ἐν τῆ τοῦ αἰῶνος παιδιῆ. LUCIAN, Vitarum Auctio, 303. Where nothing was fixed, but, as in a mixture, all things were confounded; where pleasure and pain, knowledge and ignorance, great and small, were the same; where all things up and down were circling round in a choral dance, and ever changing places as in the sport of eternity. |