I took up life in the middle, and am trying hard to twist a rope of which I never held the other end.

I feel sometimes as though it must be the life of another that I have taken, leaving my own unfinished, for I was never meant to be a professor.

That is the way of it; and if I am sad and inclined to melancholy humours, it is because I miss my old self, and he seems to have left me without even a kindly word at parting.

I was fond of my old self, but I did not respect him much.

And my present self I respect, without fondness.