I had shrunk from going back to her, as I ought to have done, in filial
humility, and, therefore, I was not allowed to go back to her in the pride
of success. Heaven knows, I had not forgotten her. Night and day I had
thought of her with prayers and blessings; but I had made a merit of my own
love to her--my forgiveness of her, as I dared to call it. I had pampered
my conceit with a notion that I was a martyr in the cause of genius and
enlightenment. How hollow, windy, heartless, all that looked now. There! I
will say no more. Heaven preserve any who read these pages from such days
and nights as I dragged on till that funeral, and for weeks after it was
over, when I had sat once more in the little old chapel, with all the
memories of my childhood crowding up, and tantalizing me with the vision
of their simple peace--never, never, to return! I heard my mother's dying
pangs, her prayers, her doubts, her agonies, for my reprobate soul,
dissected for the public good by my old enemy, Mr. Wigginton, who dragged
in among his fulsome eulogies of my mother's "signs of grace," rejoicings
that there were "babes span-long in hell.
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