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 - but not to let her enslave him.

even,

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

to think and write; and now, his writing in the field of poetry and romance having met with no extended success or encouragement, he learns by degrees what wares he can supply that the market calls for. He finds a channel for his work in the great periodicals, and less in original creation than in reviewing the work of others, a function for which he is admirably fitted. At the same time he has so honestly and thoroughly mastered the theory of his nominal profession, the law, that, though accomplishing nothing whatever in its actual practice, he can give clear and effectual exposition to the new applications of its principles which society needs. And meantime we see him cultivating a cordial fellowship with men of generous tastes and various pursuits, while he has no small share of domestic happiness. The dreaming poet depicted in "Wild Oats" has schooled himself to play well his part

as a man among men.

Thus, then, runs the wife's story:

(From the Memoir.)

In 1836 and 1837 my husband wrote several articles for the "Quarterly Review," in reference to which I find some notes from Lockhart, at that time its editor. These, and a few other letters that I shall presently refer to, had been put aside by William long years ago, and first came to sight again after our marriage, when a box of storedaway books was sent to him at Brighton. I remember well that his first impulse was to destroy these letters, but I pleaded for their preservation, and they were therefore consigned to another stationary and seldom-opened box, and thus escaped the doom of every justly appreciating written tribute paid him in later years the flames. I can recall a note from Mr. J. S. Mill, in the autumn of 1865, alluding in his large-hearted generous way to certain lectures William had delivered at Kensington more than twenty years before (lectures of which I had heard him

make a casual and disparaging mention), and that note I meant to abstract and preserve; but when I rummaged my husband's little desk, which always stood open to my inspection, I could not find it; the note had been burnt! But to return to the "Quarterly." It appears that Mr. Lockhart did not wish it to transpire that William Smith's articles were those of a young and unknown writer. In one of the notes I find, "I have heard nothing but good of your paper on Landor, and I am sure it has told tenfold the more from no one knowing as yet where it came from. Be it so with Mr. Bulwer. You will lose nothing in the issue." Never surely did editor find a contributor more conveniently willing to suppress himself! Two of these articles were on legal subjects, one on Sir Harris Nicolas, a kind friend of my husband's, at whose house he was in the habit of meeting interesting society, - one was on Modern Science, and the remaining two on Landor and Bulwer.

I wish I could more distinctly trace William Smith's legal experiences. I know that he studied every branch of law that a solicitor can practice, before he began to read for the bar with a Mr. Brodie. I think that it must have been in 1838 that he was called to the bar at the Middle Temple. Although I have spoken of office routine as irksome to him, yet in the history and philosophy of jurisprudence he always found vivid interest, and would recommend the study as eminently favorable to the best development of the mind. Certainly he never regretted in later years having undergone this legal training. Perhaps he owed to it the rare tempering of lively imagination by shrewdest common sense, of quick feeling by dispassionate judgment. But in his early days the bias towards a life devoted to poetry and abstract thought was too strong to be resisted without suffering, and the combining professional study with literary pursuits must have been a strain upon a frame that was never a strong one.