"Every individual has a place in the world, and is important to it in
some respects, whether he chooses to be so or not." So runs one of the
extracts from the "American Note-Books"; and now and then we get from
the same source a glimpse of the haunting sense that he is missing his
fit relation to the rest of the race, the question whether his pursuit
was not in some way futile like all the human pursuits he had
noticed,--whether it was not to be nipped by the same perversity and
contradiction that seemed to affect all things mundane. Here is one of
his proposed plots, which turns an inner light upon his own frame of
mind: "Various good and desirable things to be presented to a young man,
and offered to his acceptance,--as a friend, a wife, a fortune; but he
to refuse them all, suspecting that it is merely a delusion. Yet all to
be real, and he to be told so when too late." Is this not, in brief,
what he conceives may yet be the story of his own career? Another
occurs, in the same relation: "A man tries to be happy in love; he
cannot sincerely give his heart, and the affair seems all a dream. In
domestic life the same; in politics, a seeming patriot: but still he is
sincere, and all seems like a theatre." These items are the merest
indicia of a whole history of complex emotions, which made this epoch
one of continuous though silent and unseen struggle. In a Preface
prefixed to the tales, in 1851, the author wrote: "They are the
memorials of very tranquil and not unhappy years.
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