seething, found himself destined to an uncongenial calling, that of the law. "He was articled," I quote from a letter of Mr. Weigall's, "to Mr. Sharon Turner, the Anglo-Saxon historian, who was by profession an attorney; but the office routine was so distasteful to him that he soon solicited Mr. Turner to cancel his articles. Mr. Turner told him he did not feel justified in doing so, as he did not consider William at that time the best judge of what was expedient for him. William dragged through the weary hours he was required by his agreement to spend in Mr. Turner's office, and has often told me they were the most tedious and profitless in his existence." When it is remembered, too, that at this early age necessity was laid the earnest seeker after truth to loose from the old moorings and put forth, he alone, he so loving, so sensitive, so considerate of the feelings of others—alone on what then seemed "a dim and perilous way," one towards which, at all events, no member of his home ever so much as glanced, it need excite no surprise that he viewed this period of his youth as profoundly unhappy. He would occasionally revert to it, but I never encouraged any reminiscence that cast a shadow over his spirits. I feel, however, that the following passage from one of his early works sprang from personal experience :

upon

It generally happens that the external influences of daily scene and customary actions oppose their timely resistance to the desponding humour of our early days. But in my case the outward scene of life was such as to foster and encourage it. The encroaching disposition became sole possessor of my mind. The ivy grew everywhere. It spread unhindered on my path, it stole unchecked upon my dwelling, it obscured the light of day, and embowered the secluded tenant in a fixed and stationary gloom. . . . In this moody condition of my soul, every trifling disgust, every casual vexation, though disregarded of themselves, could summon up a dismal train of violent and afflicting meditations. The first disturbance, the first ripple on the sur

face, soon indeed subsided; but, to take an illustration from some fairy tale I have read, the pebble was thrown upon enchanted waters, and it roused the gloomy and tempestuous genius that lay scarce slumbering beneath them.

Yet nothing could be more true than that "his misanthropy injured no one but its owner." Such was the sweetness of his nature, and his equitable recognition of the claims of others, that I doubt if his devoted mother, or any one of the home-circle "to whose hilarity he conspicuously contributed," ever suspected that beneath such a sunlit smiling surface any gloomy genius whatsoever dwelt and stirred. A lady, however, who in her character of acquaintance may have observed more accurately than relatives, who often stand too near to see, describes him at this period as "most gentle and gracious, but seemingly quite apart from the rest in his dreamy, gentle way." She adds: "Looking at his face, one could only think of the wonderful depth and intellect of his eyes,- this was something marvellous.”

And now comes a period of which I can give scarce any account, for to my husband, whose life had long been one of abstract thinking, — impersonal, one might almost say, any attempt to recall dates was distinctly painful; and I, while gladly garnering any crumbs that fell for me from his past, was aware that he could not, even had he tried, reconstruct it consecutively. But I know that he lived with a most tender mother, a mother in whose eyes whatever William did was right; to whom his very leaving off attending church and chapel, though it might have disturbed her in the case of others, could not seem wrong. I know that his first visit to Switzerland, first sight of the Lake of Lucerne and the glories of the mountains, was paid during an early period of youth, while there was on him that misanthropic Byronic mood, in which, to use his own words, "a love and an enthusiasm for nature was a compensation for want of cordial sympathy with man,

not a related feeling strengthened by and strengthening that sympathy."

Exactly when that mood passed away forever I cannot determine, but in his earliest productions it is already looked back upon as from a distance. I will finally dismiss it in two passages of his own:

"He who has read, and felt, and risen above the poetry of Byron, will be for life a wiser man for having once been thoroughly acquainted with the morbid sentiments which there meet with so full and powerful an expression. And so variously are we constituted that there are some who find themselves best roused to vigorous and sound thinking by an author with whom they have to contend. There are who can better quiet their perturbed minds by watching the extravagances of a stronger maniac than themselves, than by listening to placid strains, however eloquent. Some there are who seem destined to find their entrance into philosophy, and into its calmest recesses, through the avenue of moody and discontented reflection." And: "It is a sort of moral conversion when a youthful mind turns from a too exclusive admiration of Byron's genius to the pages of Wordsworth." This conversion in my husband's case took place early.

I have heard him say that during his youth he was a quite rapacious reader of English and French literature. All the dramatists, all the essayists, all the historians of both countries, in addition to their philosophical writers,

nothing came amiss to him; and if the day seemed long in the lawyer's office, the nights flew in eager study. It was his custom to sit up till three or four. The dear mother must have had many an anxious thought as to the effects of such a practice on so sensitive and fragile a frame, but she never seems to have interfered, even by tender remonstrance, with her son's perfect liberty. I extract a passage of his (written in 1847) which is evidently the expression of a personal experience.

The student's lamp was burning; how calm, how still is the secluded chamber! Reflection has her emotions, thrilling

as those of passion. He who has not closed his door upon the world, and sat down with books and his own thoughts in a solitude like this, may have lived, we care not in how gay a world, or how passionate an existence, he has yet an excitement to experience which, if not so violent, is far more prolonged, deeper, and more sustained than any he has known, than any which the most brilliant scenes or the most clamorous triumphs of life can furnish. What is all the sparkling exhilaration of society, the wittiest and the fairest, what all the throbbings and perturbations of love itself, compared with the intense feeling of the youthful thinker who has man, and God, and eternity for his fresh contemplations, who for the first time perceives in his solitude all the grand enigmas of human existence lying unsolved about him? His brow is not corrugated, his eye is not inflamed; he sits calm and serene; a child would look into his face and be drawn near to him; but it seems to him that on his beating heart the very hand of God is lying.

CHAPTER II.

CLOUDS.

THE boy's letter to his sister brings him before us in his fifteenth year, the year which proved to be the last of his boyhood. He comes before us again in the first of his published writings, six years later. The intervening period gave the decisive stamp to his life. We see in him at the beginning a refined and sensitive nature, its affections developed and satisfied in the warm atmosphere of home, and its intellect already stimulated by Scotch theology and metaphysics. It was a nature that early showed its essential bias, an attraction toward truth, beauty, and love. Then came the rough transplanting into an attorney's office. The study and the work were dull and uncongenial; the knowledge acquired was dry and unnutritious; for the present, there was no recompense in the sense of service rendered to others, or even the satisfaction of earning a daily wage; and as preparation for the future, the way led to a profession which was hopelessly unsuited to the man. The result of an outward situation so repellant was to throw the young man back upon that purely interior life, of fancy, feeling, and speculation, to which by innate constitution he was prone enough without external incitement. Among the men of his time, Arthur Clough is the one with whom it is most natural to compare him. The two were alike in their thirst for truth and their purity of life, and they swam in the same sea of thought. But Clough was happy in the circumstance that his early years were passed at Rugby and at Oxford; where along with his Latin and Greek he