midnight
To be free to go where he liked , and when he liked ; to think as he pleased ; to be driven nowhere by conventional rules ; to use his days , Sundays as well as Mondays , as he pleased to use them ; to turn Republican , if his mind should take him that way , -- or Quaker , or Mormon , or Red Indian , if he wished it , and in so turning to do no damage to any one but himself ; -- that was the life which he had planned for himself . His Aunt Stanbury had not read his character altogether wrongly , as he thought , when she had once declared that decency and godliness were both distasteful to him . Would it not be destruction to such a one as he was , to fall into an interminable engagement with any girl , let her be ever so sweet ? But yet , he felt as he sat there , filling pipe after pipe , smoking away till past midnight , that though he could not bear the idea of trammels , though he was totally unfit for matrimony , either present or in prospect , -- he felt that he had within his breast a double identity , and that that other division of himself would be utterly crushed if it were driven to divest itself of the idea of love . Whence was to come his poetry , the romance of his life , the springs of clear water in which his ignoble thoughts were to be dipped till they should become pure , if love was to be banished altogether from the list of delights that were possible to him ? And then he began to speculate on love , -- that love of which poets wrote , and of which he found that some sparkle was necessary to give light to his life . Was it not the one particle of divine breath given to man , of which he had heard since he was a boy ?