Martin Faber-The Story of a Criminal by William Gilmore Simms

Under the direction of a more supple tutor than the first, I finished my education, if so we may call it. William Harding was still my associate. He was still the same nervous, susceptible, gentle youth; and though, as he grew older, the more yielding points of his character became modified in his associations with society, he nevertheless did not vary in his mental and moral make, from what I have already described him. Though disapproving of many of my habits and propensities, and continually exhorting me upon them, he yet felt the compliment which my spirit, involuntarily, as it were, rendered to his; and he was not at any time averse to the association which I tendered him. Still he was like me in few respects, if any. It is the somewhat popular notion that sympathy in pursuit, and opinions and sentiments in common, bring about the connexions of friendship and love. I think differently. Such connexions spring from a thousand causes which have no origin in mutual sympathies. The true source of the relationship is the dependence and weakness on the one hand--the strength and protection on the other. This, I verily believe, was the fact in our case.

With little other society than that of William Harding, years glided away, and if they brought little improvement to my moral attributes-- they, at least, bringing no provocation, left in abeyance and dormancy, many of those which were decidedly immoral. My physical man was decidedly improved in their progress. My features underwent considerable change for the better--my manners were far less objectionable--I had suppressed the more rude and brutal features, and, mingling more with society--that particularly of the other sex--I had seen and obeyed the necessity of a gentlemanly demeanor. But my heart occupied the same place and character--there was no change in that region. There, all was stubborness and selfishness--a scorn for the possessions and claims of others--a resolute and persevering impulse which perpetually sought to exercise and elevate its own. The spell of my fate was upon it--it seemed seared and soured--and while it blighted, and sought to blight the fortunes and the feelings of others, without any sympathy, it seemed nevertheless, invariably, to partake of the blight. In this respect, in the vexation of my spirit at this strange inconsistency of character, I used to curse myself, that I was not like the serpent--that I could not envenom my enemy, without infecting my own system, with the poison meant only for his. To this mood, the want of employment gave activity if not exercise and exhibition. The secretions of my malignity, having no object of development, jaundiced my whole moral existence; and a general hostility to human nature and the things of society, at this stage of my being, vented itself in idle curses, and bitter but futile denunciations. I lived only in the night time--my life has been a long night, in which there has been no starlight--in which there have been many tempests. Talk not of Greenland darkness, or Norwegian ice. The moral darkness is the most solid--and what cold is there like that, where, walled in a black dungeon of hates and fears and sleepless hostility, the heart broods in bitterness and solitude, over its own cankering and malignant purposes.