midnight
Many men may perhaps be found who will give up to duty a cherished wish or even a darling vice ; but few will ever renounce to it their rooted tastes , or the indulgence of those habits which have almost become by long use their happiness itself . Naturally melancholy and thoughtful , feeding the sensibilities of his heart upon fiction , and though addicted to the cultivation of reason rather than fancy , having perhaps more of the deeper and acuter characteristics of the poet than those calm and half-callous properties of nature supposed to belong to the metaphysician and the calculating moralist , Mordaunt was above all men fondly addicted to solitude , and inclined to contemplations less useful than profound . The untimely death of Isabel , whom he had loved with that love which is the vent of hoarded and passionate musings long nourished upon romance , and lavishing the wealth of a soul that overflows with secreted tenderness upon the first object that can bring reality to fiction , -- that event had not only darkened melancholy into gloom , but had made loneliness still more dear to his habits by all the ties of memory and all the consecrations of regret . The companionless wanderings ; the midnight closet ; the thoughts which , as Hume said of his own , could not exist in the world , but were all busy with life in seclusion , -- these were rendered sweeter than ever to a mind for which the ordinary objects of the world were now utterly loveless ; and the musings of solitude had become , as it were , a rightful homage and offering to the dead . We may form , then , some idea of the extent to which , in Mordaunt 's character , principle predominated over inclination , and regard for others over the love of self , when we see him tearing his spirit from its beloved retreats and abstracted contemplations , and devoting it to duties from which its fastidious and refined characteristics were particularly calculated to revolt . When we have considered his attachment to the hermitage , we can appreciate the virtue which made him among the most active citizens in the great world ; when we have considered the natural selfishness of grief , the pride of philosophy , the indolence of meditation , the eloquence of wealth , which says , `` Rest , and toil not , '' and the temptation within , which says , `` Obey the voice , '' -- when we have considered these , we can perhaps do justice to the man who , sometimes on foot and in the coarsest attire , travelled from inn to inn and from hut to hut ; who made human misery the object of his search and human happiness of his desire ; who , breaking aside an aversion to rude contact , almost feminine in its extreme , voluntarily sought the meanest companions , and subjected himself to the coarsest intrusions ; for whom the wail of affliction or the moan of hunger was as a summons which allowed neither hesitation nor appeal ; who seemed possessed of a ubiquity for the purposes of good almost resembling that attributed to the wanderer in the magnificent fable of Melmoth for the temptations to evil ; who , by a zeal and labour that brought to habit and inclination a thousand martyrdoms , made his life a very hour-glass , in which each sand was a good deed or a virtuous design . Many plunge into public affairs , to which they have had a previous distaste , from the desire of losing the memory of a private affliction ; but so far from wishing to heal the wounds of remembrance by the anodynes which society can afford , it was only in retirement that Mordaunt found the flowers from which balm could be distilled .