AT twenty years of age, the young man had thus showed himself already no mean proficient in the noblest of arts, and his literary success was sufficient to open to him the society of the scholarly and thoughtful, if he chose to enter there. His brother-in-law, Mr. Weigall, says the Memoir, told in after years, what William Smith did not choose to tell for himself, that John Sterling's father, the "Thunderer" of the "Times," called to congratulate him on the success of his young kinsman, and declared, in his ardent Irish fashion, that "such pure and elegant English had not been written since the days of Addison." He was invited to join the Union Debating Society. "I accompanied him," Mr. Weigall writes in 1873, "more than once to the Union debates. I remember one occasion especially on which John Stuart Mill was in the chair. There were present on that evening Mr. Roebuck, Mr. H. L. Bulwer (afterwards Lord Dalling), Mr. Romilly (the present Lord), Sir Henry Taylor (author of "Philip Van Artevelde"), and William. I never on any other occasion heard such an eloquent debate. chiefly in reply to Sir H. Taylor with his usual gentleness." ... William spoke very forcibly, but not Here, one would have said, were the omens of an active and distinguished career. The young knight had shown his mettle, not only in letters, but in the manly jostle of debate. He had fallen in company with such strong and promising young spirits as Sterling and Maurice and Mill. Equipped with power of thought, of love, of self-control; having already won a hearing; with generous companionship at his command, — what was to hinder his playing a stirring part in the leadership of the time? But he was already under the spell of the enchantress who was to lead him by far different paths from those of stirring leadership. Her name was Solitude. The fascination of his own thoughts perpetually withdrew him from the society of his kind. He was haunted by visions of ideal beauty and questionings about absolute truth. Such themes absorbed and possessed him; they wrapt him away from that homely and matter-of-fact earth on which men are wont to hold intercourse with each other in striving or serving. To those about him he often seemed like one in a dream; while to his own consciousness he was living in a world of intense reality, which yet he felt to be set apart by some strange impalpable barrier from the world of visible realities. But the life of thought and imagination in the individual tends to cut its own channel of communication with the actual world. That channel is self-expression in literature. 66 Every reflective man," says William Smith, "may be set down as at heart an author, whether he has yielded or not to the seductive impulse. Some intention, though it may be most vague and remote, to write mingles itself with the efforts of every man who from reading has been taught to think." There are three productions of William Smith's which date from the period between his twentieth and thirtieth years. Of his first prose work "Ernesto: a Philosophical Romance," his wife tells us that it was written "much about this time " apparently soon after "The Wool-Gatherer," but was only published in 1835, as the last volume of "The Library of Romance," edited by Leitch Ritchie. It was with some difficulty, she tells us, that she prevailed upon her husband to give her a copy of this early production, "the very story of which he had utterly forgotten, and never cared to glance over. Imma ture he no doubt was right in pronouncing it, but it abounds in thoughtful and eloquent passages. There is in it the promise of Thorndale.'" It is not until eight years after "The Wool-Gatherer " that we find, in 1836, a little volume put forth containing two poems. They illustrate what had been the workings of the young man's heart in the intervening time. One of them, entitled "Solitude," is evidently a direct transcript from experience. Two passages will show its quality : Oh, there is rapture in this thoughtful calm! I see the utmost summit of the cliff, Lone in the azure — an eternal rest! I see the bounding waters at my feet Poised with the mountain, with the wave afloat, Their rest or motion Fast fills my heart an eternal peace! A second dawn of beauty on the world, Sees a sweet shape, close folded in soft plumes, That prompts its thundering speed. Creeps the moist mould No living thing so dull, but its dull joy Shall be a joy of mine; walks not in heav'n, With step reflected in its golden floor, Can hither bring me of its happiness. Fair, lone acacia, midway down the cliff, Will share the while thy voiceless piety. Ye little social pair! but let me here Still see, unseen, and love though not beloved. Ah happy man! the fisherman at eve Who raising high in air with outstretched arms One beating heart ta' en from the hive of life, With lightest pressure of my listless palm, My solitary features, sunk I feel To torpid, slow, and desolate regard ! What was my crime? What horrid guilt was mine, 'T was thy own sentence thou thyself wert judge, Beauty, melancholy, self-imprisonment, the same note runs through the whole. The other poem, "Guidone," is a drama; and in the dramatic form, the variety of characters, and the action of the story, we see, in contrast with "Solitude," the effort to break away from lonely musing, to mingle with and portray the world's life of action and passion. But the world here mirrored is a very troublous one. Upon the gentle and sensitive spirit which looks out on the fray, it is the terror, the confusion, the tragedy, which makes the deepest impression. Two distinct stories are brought together in "Guidone," with little dramatic unity. In the one, a youth is roused from dreamy seclusion by a mutual love, which yields him an ecstasy intense but brief, and followed by complication and wreck. With this is coupled an outlaw, in whom wrong-doing has changed the calm ponderings of serene philosophy into visions of terror and emotions of despair, and who at last by an act of forgiveness regains the sense of peace and hope. Of this drama the author says that it was " written without the most remote reference to the theatre, and that it aims at exhibiting states of mind rather than individual character, and pretends to no interest of plot or story." It contains many passages which by their beauty tempt to quotation, but the strain of sadness and introspection is closely interwoven with the whole. There are phrases and thoughts that sink into the memory. The drama once begun can scarcely be laid down unfinished by any thoughtful reader. The ear and the imagination are charmed, and thought is deeply stirred. The defects. of imperfect structure and of excessive melancholy are obvious. Evidently it is the outcome of a nature too deeply self-involved. The mind casts on every object the hues of its own introspection. Lover, outlaw, hermit, each is enmeshed in speculation and self-consciousness. The real earth of action and passion and struggle is seen invested in exaggerated terrors, because the spectator is too much aloof from it to share the throb and glow which to the actors make good the pains. This of the book, and what of the writer? His history at this period can in no way so well be inferred as from a chapter of professed fiction, written some four years after the publication of " Guidone." A reference by his wife to two incidents as autobiographical, and a multiplicity of internal evidence, show that the paper called "Wild Oats a New Species," in "Blackwood's Magazine" for June, 1840, published anonymously, was essen |