was not in his power to much lessen that pain in material forms; but the sense of mankind's trouble rested on him; it was that which laid a burden on his mind, the burden with which he perpetually strove. Might it not indeed be his office to find some interpretation of all the pain and sorrow which should itself be some lightening of the load, and give some guidance and aid toward bearing it? Something like this, we shall find, was indeed a part of his contribution to the common cause; and it was a contribution he could only make when so far withdrawn from the immediate pressure of the crowd as to get in broader view and truer perspective the movement of the throng, oppressive jostle to those in its midst, perhaps a triumphant march when viewed from some serene, distant height.

an

So far from being an idler, he was one of the busiest of men. His work was of the kind which is never laid aside. It was with him while his eyes rested on the landscape, and when in the night he woke from sleep it woke with him. He was essaying a task as great as man can set before himself, to learn, so far as may be, the plan of this universe. None knew better than he how far that aim soars beyond the possibilities of full realization. But in the unremitting exploration lay a fascination and a profound delight, as well as a noble sadness. Hours there were of joy in the perception of some truth, the harmonizing of old contradictions, the rapt contemplation of ineffable realities; joy like that of

"Some watcher of the skies

When a new planet swims into his ken."

And meanwhile, month by month, the book was growing under his hand, — the chart that registered his discoveries and his perplexities; the flags planted on new islands; the signals and memoranda for future explorers who should push farther the quest. How dear to the author is the

book as it slowly matures in his brain, slowly shapes itself in visible form; what sacred gestation, as of the child nourished by all finest distillation of its mother's frame, her long-prepared, supreme gift to the world!

Other work there was, less arduous; the series of contributions to "Blackwood" went on without interruption, some four or five a year; reviews of works on metaphysics, poetry, biography, natural science, law. There is one paper in August, 1851, on " Voltaire in the Crystal Palace," which greatly tempts to quotation. It is the imaginary comments of the shrewd worldling, as he strolls through the great exhibition, and surveys the material trophies of the century. The vein is altogether charming; with rapid, penetrating glance at social and industrial problems; with satire for follies of the day, and through all the amiable temper which befits a holiday. It is "the philosopher at the fair;" the large mind looking in kindliest survey on the society from which it stands apart. But this isolation deepened that loneliness which from youth had lain upon his sensitive and gentle nature. At heart he was a true lover of his kind. He longed for tenderness, for communion. Some subtle withdrawal, some invincible reserve, held him as if in a crystal prison, through which he looked with yearning eyes to the fair forms of humanity, on which his hands could not lay hold. The quotations we have given from his early poem, "Solitude," show something of the perpetual revulsion from the mind's delight in its visions to the heart's ache in its loneliness. It is the household atmosphere which makes the shrine of human happiness. From its warmth he was quite apart, from the clinging hands of little children, from the tender cares which solace while they task, from the pure blessedness with which husband and wife look into each other's eyes. It was a characteristic completion of his isolation that he had not the society of animals, he did not like dogs. One wishes for him in his solitary

rambles at least the companionship of a faithful fourfooted friend, to break in upon his master's reverie with a nose thrust lovingly into his hand, or draw a smile to the abstracted face as he plunges into some doggish delight of frolic or exploration. The winter visits to friends there were indeed, and even in the summer some occasional brief companionship. But how alone the man seems! What waste of a heart that might enrich some other! What starvation of a nature formed for the full, glorious estate of love! Can Heaven do no better for its creature than this?

CHAPTER XIV.

APPROACHING UNSEEN.

In the years when William Smith was “a fair yellowhaired child, with great black eyes full of the new joy and wonder of life," another child's life began. A young Scotch physician had gone into Wales to push his fortunes, and there found a wife. She was of an old Welsh family, of higher social station than his, and her relatives were slow in becoming reconciled to her marriage with a young doctor without advantages of rank or wealth. But he had the force of brain and of character to win his in the world, as he had won his wife. He practised his profession for some years in Chester, and finally settled in Wales, near Denbigh, in a lovely home which was named Dolhyfryd, “Happy Valley." Here in 1818 Lucy Caroline Cumming saw the light, and here she grew to womanhood. A sister and a brother completed the family, of which she was the youngest.

way

The mother, "a bright, energetic, delightful woman," loved in later years to talk of her Lucy's childhood. The young nature began early to show its quality, swift, vivid, and ardent. At eighteen months the child could repeat a great number of hymns, and at two years she could read in any ordinary book. Before she was ten, she read and delighted in a class of books of which Molière's plays, in the original, is mentioned as a specimen. When she was about ten, her taste ran to theological reading, and she used to discuss these topics with a friend of her own age, being herself a staunch Calvinist.

But this sort of precocity does not indicate the highest

gifts with which the child had been dowered, as if by good spirits, at her birth. One might fancy that the mixture in her veins of Scotch and Welsh blood had given her all the intensity and tenacity of the one, the perfervidum ingenium Scotorum, - together with the ardor and spontaneity of the more southern temperament. Above all she was rich in capacity to give and to inspire love, — a trait involving for herself possibilities almost unbounded of joy and pain, of hope and fear; while for others it bore throughout her life an unmixed fruitage of blessing.

Her mother, we are told, used to talk to her when she was a mere child as to a grown-up person, telling her all her troubles and anxieties. Every one loved her, and her old nurse told one secret of the charm in saying, "You can come so near Miss Lucy!" She was on the friendliest terms with the poor families in the neighborhood; and it is related that in one of these, a child being dangerously ill, and she having known of it, when there came sudden relief to the child the father's first words were, “Run quick and tell Miss Lucy!"

She grew up into most attractive maidenhood, - beautiful, brilliant, a young Diana in her spirit and her charms. From the age of sixteen she was the object of one devoted attachment after another. But the heart was not lightly to be won in its stronghold. The romances which followed each other did not touch her with their flame, not though she was sometimes sought with so true a passion that two men who failed to win her vowed to be faithful to her memory all their lives, and never married. More than once she acknowledged an attachment, and even a charm, in which there seemed the promise of a mutual happiness, but always the tie snapped instead of strengthening; something proved to be wanting that her fastidious taste, her exacting nature, required, and as she afterward said, "In those days I never met my master."