PART I.

THESE men were philosophers, not from the desire of fame, not from the pleasure of intellectual discovery, not because they hoped that philosophy would suggest thoughts that would soothe some private grief of their own, but because it was to them an overpowering interest to have some key to the universe, because all even of their desires were suspected by them until they could find some central desire on which to link the rest; and love and beauty and the animation of life were no pleasure to them except as testifying to that something beyond of which they were in search. Quarterly Review.

"Led by the Spirit into the wilderness."

CHAPTER I.

MORNING.

(From the Memoir.)

THAT must have been a happy home at North End, Hammersmith, into which, during the January of 1808, William Henry Smith was born, the youngest of a large family. His father, a man of strong natural intelligence, after having made a fortune sufficient for his wants, early retired from business, in consequence mainly of an asthmatic tendency, which had harassed him from the age of thirty. The impression I gained of him from his son's description was that of one peculiarly fond of quiet and of books, but whose will gave law to his household, and was uniformly seconded by the loving loyalty of his wife. The large family had a recognized head, a condition I have often heard my husband insist upon as essential to all healthy domestic life. Whatever the spirits of the children might prompt, it was an understood, a felt law, that "Papa's" tastes and habits must be respected. And these, being interpreted by so gentle a mother, were never viewed in the light of unreasonable restraints. This dear mother seems to have been a woman of a quite primitive type, full of silent piety, wrapped up in the home and the family. She was of partly German extraction; her mother had been an eminently saintly character, and I have caught glimpses too of a grandfather devoted to the study of Jacob Boehme, whose folio volumes, and the tradition of the veneration in which they had been held, still existed in the Hammersmith home.

How often, by the divination of love and sorrow, I have

tried to conjure up that home before my mind! My husband once took me to its site, but the good old house had been cut up into shops, and the large garden was all gone,

the large garden, that had seemed so large to the happy child playing there by the hour "under the scarlet and purple blossoms of the fuchsias," under the benignant eye, too, of a well-remembered old servant, gardener, and groom, who kept the plants and the sleek discreet horse "Papa" drove in his gig in equal order. It was an every-day delight to play in that garden, a high privilege to ride in that gig. I think I can see the father, very tall, a little worn by asthma, with black eyes of peculiar piercing power, and a certain stateliness and natural dignity which were wont to receive from officials at public places a degree of deference, noticed with some amusement by the little observant companion and sight-seer. What he must have been at an early age a miniature then taken shows. It represents a fair, yellow-haired child of about three, with great black eyes full of the new joy and wonder of life, and a smile of singular sweetness, of almost benignity. No wonder that, as his eldest surviving sister affectionately recalls, "he was the pet of both parents," though his exceeding mobility did sometimes a little agitate the valetudinarian father, who would lay down a half-crown on the table and say, "William, you shall have it, if you will only sit still for ten minutes! A child with such an expression as the picture shows would surely have complied had it been any way possible; but he did not remember that the half-crown was ever won. One day, when he was very small, a canary bird belonging to a sister died, and was buried beneath a flower-bush in the garden; and on that occasion, when the bright and restless creature lying suddenly motionless on the palm of some young hand had given the happy child his first experience of wondering sadness, he wrote his first verses.