not a related feeling strengthened by and strengthening that sympathy."

Exactly when that mood passed away forever I cannot determine, but in his earliest productions it is already looked back upon as from a distance. I will finally dismiss it in two passages of his own:

"He who has read, and felt, and risen above the poetry of Byron, will be for life a wiser man for having once been thoroughly acquainted with the morbid sentiments which there meet with so full and powerful an expression. And so variously are we constituted that there are some who find themselves best roused to vigorous and sound thinking by an author with whom they have to contend. There are who can better quiet their perturbed minds by watching the extravagances of a stronger maniac than themselves, than by listening to placid strains, however eloquent. Some there are who seem destined to find their entrance into philosophy, and into its calmest recesses, through the avenue of moody and discontented reflection." And: "It is a sort of moral conversion when a youthful mind turns from a too exclusive admiration of Byron's genius to the pages of Wordsworth." This conversion in my husband's case took place early.

I have heard him say that during his youth he was a quite rapacious reader of English and French literature. All the dramatists, all the essayists, all the historians of both countries, in addition to their philosophical writers,

nothing came amiss to him; and if the day seemed long in the lawyer's office, the nights flew in eager study. It was his custom to sit up till three or four. The dear mother must have had many an anxious thought as to the effects of such a practice on so sensitive and fragile a frame, but she never seems to have interfered, even by tender remonstrance, with her son's perfect liberty. I extract a passage of his (written in 1847) which is evidently the expression of a personal experience.

The student's lamp was burning; how calm, how still is the secluded chamber! . . . Reflection has her emotions, thrilling as those of passion. He who has not closed his door upon the world, and sat down with books and his own thoughts in a solitude like this, may have lived, we care not in how gay a world, or how passionate an existence, he has yet an excitement to experience which, if not so violent, is far more prolonged, deeper, and more sustained than any he has known, than any which the most brilliant scenes or the most clamorous triumphs of life can furnish. What is all the sparkling exhilaration of society, the wittiest and the fairest, what all the throbbings and perturbations of love itself, compared with the intense feeling of the youthful thinker who has man, and God, and eternity for his fresh contemplations, who for the first time perceives in his solitude all the grand enigmas of human existence lying unsolved about him? His brow is not corrugated, his eye is not inflamed; he sits calm and serene; a child would look into his face and be drawn near to him; but it seems to him that on his beating heart the very hand of God is lying.

CHAPTER II.

CLOUDS.

THE boy's letter to his sister brings him before us in his fifteenth year, the year which proved to be the last of his boyhood. He comes before us again in the first of his published writings, six years later. The intervening period gave the decisive stamp to his life. We see in him at the beginning a refined and sensitive nature, its affections developed and satisfied in the warm atmosphere of home, and its intellect already stimulated by Scotch theology and metaphysics. It was a nature that early showed its essential bias, an attraction toward truth, beauty, and love. Then came the rough transplanting into an attorney's office. The study and the work were dull and uncongenial; the knowledge acquired was dry and unnutritious; for the present, there was no recompense in the sense of service rendered to others, or even the satisfaction of earning a daily wage; and as preparation for the future, the way led to a profession which was hopelessly unsuited to the man. The result of an outward situation so repellant was to throw the young man back upon that purely interior life, of fancy, feeling, and speculation, to which by innate constitution he was prone enough without external incitement. Among the men of his time, Arthur Clough is the one with whom it is most natural to compare him. The two were alike in their thirst for truth and their purity of life, and they swam in the same sea of thought. But Clough was happy in the circumstance that his early years were passed at Rugby and at Oxford; where along with his Latin and Greek he

got the hardy training of the foot-ball ground and the river, the grand influence of Dr. Arnold, and that companionship with fresh youthful spirits which he so charmingly portrays in the "Bothie." For him, the unsparing quest for absolute truth was postponed until his sinews had been knit and he had been fortified by generous comradeships against the loneliness which besets the thinker.

But no such kindly apprenticeship fell to the boy of our story. Glasgow College and Dr. Chalmers had already set him to thinking. Such thought led into fields infinitely attractive to a mind like his. Now there were no counter attractions, and the entire energies of his nature were swept along into a world of such fascination, its splendors so enthralling, its terrors so enchaining, that under its spell the whole external world, its law-books, its drudgery, its London streets, its men and women, and even its home companionships, became in comparison far away and dim. As the children of Hamelin followed the piper's music, so this boy followed the mysterious musician whose melodies are reverie and speculation, and passed into a realm apart from the workaday world.

There is nothing to indicate with certainty the precise course of his early thinking. But one of the characters in “Thorndale ” affords a clue which we may follow with reasonable confidence that under the name of Cyril we have in substance, if not in form, a part of the youthful experience of William Smith.

A pious and affectionate youth may, without blame on his part, commence his career of independent thinking by a rebellion against some of his most sacred feelings, by a violence done to his best affections. His peace of mind is disturbed, and the harmony of the family circle is broken by an invisible enemy, who has stolen upon him in the very hours of study and meditation. Those earliest and dearest friendships, as well as those first and sacred convictions, which should have lasted him his whole life, are put in jeopardy at the very outset.

For some time our inquiring youth keeps his doubt a close prisoner within his own bosom. At length, one day, being more daring or more despondent than usual, he gives expression, in the family circle, to some of those sceptical questionings he has been secretly revolving. As soon as the words have passed his lips - how those lips trembled as he spoke! - he feels that it was not an opinion only he has uttered, but a defiance. And it is not an answer, but a reproof, that he receives. An elder brother frowns, a sister weeps, a parent solemnly rebukes. Sad and inauspicious entrance on the paths of inquiry. He retreats into himself, perturbed, disdainful, with a rankling sense of injustice done to him.

Beyond the family circle the case is little better. In general society he soon learns that the subject of religion is altogether inadmissible. There is but one thing more distasteful to well-bred people than a religious sentiment or opinion, and that is the least show of opposition to it. You must think over these if you must think in perfect retirement. The one half of society requires that you respect its faith, the other half that you respect its hypocrisy.

matters

... Such an one, when I knew him, was Cyril. A youth of more blameless manners there could not be. His parents were distinguished for their evangelical piety, and were delighted to watch the development of his ardent and unaffected devotion. His nature had entirely responded to the religious training he had received. How came doubt, it will be asked, in such a mind? What sceptical works was he likely to read? And if he had been persuaded to read any such works, would they have produced any other impression on a person of this description than pain and offence? Let their statements or reasonings be what they might, such a person would only have been stung, irritated, wounded by them—not convinced or shaken.

But the enemy may approach in a far more insidious manner than by a direct attack. His father took a great interest in the subject of reformatory punishment, as it is sometimes called. (The combination of reformatory and educational measures with punishment, would be a more accurate expression for the object which such philanthropists have in view.) Schemes of prison discipline formed the most frequent topic of conversation at his