At some such explosion as this it was that you most irreverently burst into a fit of laughter. Then, suddenly checking your mirth, you very gravely said, shaking that long head of thine, "This won't do, Howard. This is worse than ever. When you were riding your hobby, though it were ever so cursed a one, though it were even of Pegasian breed, you made some way, or at all events had a way you wished to go; but now that you have not even got a hobby to mount, I cannot tell what is to become of you. Have you really no better stuff to make a life of than this super-refinement of philosophy? Do you expect to remain there standing where we cannot soar,' merely looking on, just thinking of us all, or rather viewing all things as they are reflected in a sort of mirror which you have fixed up for yourself on that serene altitude? God help thee! I say."

Even you, when you uttered these ill bodings, had little expectation how soon they were to be justified, or by how slight and gentle a hand I was to be dashed from my elevation. There came to visit us the daughter of an old friend of the family, a captain who had retired into Devonshire to make his half-pay extend over the expenses of the whole year. She was neither the most beautiful, nor the most witty, nor the most accomplished of her sex; but she was wonderfully pleasing, constantly cheerful and amiable, with a genuine frankness of manner quite delightful. I suppose that, in my conversations with Juliana, which grew to be frequent enough, it was I who bore the chief part, yet it seemed to me that from her alone all the conversation really sprung. Had I been asked, I should have attributed all the merit, if merit of any kind there was, all that was curious or refined in our dialogue, all its mirth and pleasantry and feeling, entirely to her.

The period of her visit flew like magic. She returned home. The day of her departure passed long and heavily. I smiled at myself, and anticipated forgetfulness and tranquillity on the morrow. The morrow came, and the day after, but they brought neither forgetfulness nor tranquillity, but many new trains of thought, simple enough, yet disquieting in the extreme. If to love it is necessary to believe all beauty and all amiability centred in one woman, I was certainly not in that predicament. But the charming social intercourse which had been suddenly

broken up had made a revelation to me of what existed in my own heart, which it seemed impossible again to forget. I could not follow her. I could not marry. For the first time in my

life I knew that I was poor.

And now there rushed upon me at once, as if up to that moment I had been stone-blind, the vision of the real world. I saw it as it stood in relation to me. I stood face to face with it. O God! how I felt the utter loneliness of that moment! I had spent my days in weaving a miserable screen-work between me and the sole happiness of life. I had forfeited, I had thrown away, I had lost forever, that only boon which seemed to justify the providence of God in the creation of this world. You, my friend, came upon me in the height of this despair. You found me sitting alone in my study. You remember the scene that followed. I cannot recur to it. I have felt a pleasure in recalling the past wanderings of my spirit; but those moments of passion I cannot dwell upon. You know how bitterly I railed, scoffed, jeered at myself, and at every employment that had ever engrossed me. I had found in philosophy no faith, in the world no path of duty; in my heart I had found affections, and these were to be utterly crushed. I had somewhere read, I think in one of the novels of Goethe, of a melancholy man, who, finding his thoughts run much and incontrollably upon self-destruction, procured a dagger, and whenever the black hour of his melancholy recurred, the production of the keen and polished instrument, the handling of it, and the consciousness that if he pleased he might, used to calm the fever of his thoughts. A vague idea that either in this way or another, I might find a remedy in such an instrument, induced me to procure one, and I had deposited it in my writing-desk. As I chafed myself with bitter and miserable talk, I suddenly snatched it from its hiding-place, and dashed the blade against my heart. It would have been driven to the hilt, but that you rushed forward and struck it from my hand. Can either of us ever forget that moment when we both looked upon the dagger as it lay upon the floor?

Doggedly, sullenly, but without a relapse, I have since laboured at the profession in which you find me. You may per

ceive that my labours have not been without recompense. But

this is not half my reward. Severe and steady occupation has brought with it an equanimity of mind which I need not tell you is more precious than wealth. My friend, the wine stays with

you.

With a few omissions and changes, we may undoubtedly in this story substitute for the imaginary Howard the real William Smith. The unsuccessful books were buried just as is here related. It may fairly be presumed that there did succeed a period in which meditation ran its own unchecked course, with little or no attempt at literary expression. The duration of this period can only be guessed. "Guidone' " and "Solitude' were published in 1836; and in 1839 we find their author engaged with some regularity in literary work and living in a circle of friends. To the intervening time we may refer the experience indicated in "Wild Oats." For the light, not unkindly satire with which he touches on his own fruitless ponderings, an impartial historian might substitute a very different tone. Inconclusive the thought may well be which essays these loftiest themes, of the nature of the universe and the destiny of mankind, — inconclusive, yet not the less noble and enriching. The sympathy with all the various moods of the intellect, it is not the quality which builds railroads, or wins proselytes, or guides a parliament, but it is a generous and lofty disposition.

Yet the satire has a basis of truth. The attempt of a human life to support itself wholly in the region of abstractions is as hopeless as for a bird to try to live always on the wing. And in this case, the fall to earth, the bruising contact with actualities, came in just the way related. Many years afterward, to the happy betrothed whose love had made good all previous loss, the story was told, as it is outlined in the tale, of an attractive woman who awoke in him a regard, which was checked at the outset by the consciousness of the poverty to which his unpractical life had consigned him. The passion does not seem to have been a deep one, but its frus

tration had to him a wide significance; it came as a most poignant reminder of the intense, unquenchable yearning of his human nature for close human affection, which all his wanderings in the ideal world had left unsatisfied. The revulsion and despair may have taken no such extreme form as the attempt at suicide portrays, yet may have been hardly less profound. The worldly success which Howard afterward wins is far from a representation of anything that came to William Smith. But the brief sentence which tells of "equanimity of mind" acquired hints at the truth. It is characteristic of the writer that even in the disguise of fiction he makes no appeal to admiration and little even to pity. So much of his story as was fair theme for satire, and perhaps for warning, he would give-and no more. Only at the catastrophe of the poem's failure, and again at the final climax, the easy self-command and self-derision passes for a moment into profound pathos. The power to tell the story in such a vein of composure best marks the self-conquest that had followed.

But in actual life the conflicting elements which strive for mastery in a soul rarely work out a stable equilibrium in a single encounter. Not in one battle, nor in one campaign, does even the victorious man conquer a lasting peace. When we read in the Epistle to the Romans of man's struggle with sin, emerging in the triumphant cry, "I thank God through Jesus Christ our Lord!" - we may be pretty sure that as a personal experience something like this happened to Paul, not once, but many times, after he wrote the Epistle as well as before. There may be one critical fight which is a turning-point in the war, or there may be several, but the enemy never capitulates.

To William Smith, meditation was always an enchantress, but her spell was in part a rightful one. His task was to keep her in place as friend, as helper, as queen even, - but not to let her enslave him.

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CHAPTER VI.

WORK AND ASSOCIATES.

THE story of the next few years is now to be told by the wife. For a true view of his character, her description is the fit supplement to such self-disclosure as our last chapter contains. Self-portraiture is always incomplete. A man can tell his own thoughts and feelings better than any one else, but a further and essential measure of his character is the impression he makes on others.

The reader will have felt a note of sadness predominating in the self-disclosure. He will recognize as the prominent feature in the wife's portrayal the beauty and charm of character. The two aspects are to be accepted, not only as equally real, but as helping to interpret each other. He locked up the sadness in his own heart; no gloom, no shadow was cast by it upon the lives around him; the only expression it found was in the hue it lent to his writings, where it was ennobled by association with lofty thought. That gracious and winning aspect which he wore not only to his devoted wife, but in a degree to all who knew him, including natures as masculine and robust as Lewes and Sterling, -derived its sweetness in part from the firm self-control with which his melancholy was held shut in his own breast. There is no finer chemistry than that by which the element of suffering is so compounded with spiritual forces that it issues to the world as gentleness and strength.

Of the events which the wife's pen now traces, it may summarily be said that in them we see the man getting gradual and sure hold of his proper work. He was born