 Chapter 11 of Father and Son. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Eugene Smith. Father and Son by Edmund Goss. Chapter 11. As my mental horizon widened, my father followed the direction of my spiritual eyes with some bewilderment and knew not at what I gazed. Nor could I have put into words, nor could I even now define, the visions which held my vague and timid attention. As a child develops, those who regard it with tenderness or impatience are seldom even approximately correct in their analysis of its intellectual movements, largely because, if there is anything to record, it defies adult definition. One curious freak of mentality, I must now mention, because it took a considerable part in the enfranchisement of my mind, or rather in the formation of my thinking habits. But neither my father nor my stepmother knew what to make of it, and to tell the truth, I hardly know what to make of it myself. Among the books which my new mother had brought with her were certain editions of the poets, an odd assortment. Campbell was there, and Burns and Keats, and the tales of Byron. Each of these might have been expected to appeal to me, but my emotion was too young, and I did not listen to them yet. Their imperative voices called me later. By the side of these romantic classics stood a small thick volume, bound in black Morocco, and comprising four reprinted works of the 18th century, loomy funereal poems of an order as wholly out of date as are the crossbones and ruffled cherubim on the gravestones in a country churchyard. The four, and in this order, as I shall never forget, were the last day of Dr. Young, Blair's grave, death by Bishop Biobe Portius, and the deity of Samuel Boyce. These lugubrious effusions, all in blank verse or in the heroic couplet, represented in its most redundant form the artistic theology of the middle of the 18th century. They were steeped in such vengeful and hortatory sentiments as passed for elegant piety in the reign of George II. How I came to open this solemn volume is explained by the oppressive exclusiveness of our Sundays. On the afternoon of the Lord's Day, as I have already explained, I might neither walk, nor talk, nor explore our scientific library, nor indulge in furious feats of watercolor painting. The Plymouth Brother theology, which alone was open to me, produced, at length, and particularly on hot afternoons, a faint physical nausea, a kind of secret headache. But, hitting one day upon the doleful book of verses and observing its religious character, I asked, May I read that? And after a brief, astonished glance at the contents, I received, Oh, certainly, if you can, the lawn sloped directly from a veranda at our drawing room window, and it contained two immense elm trees, which had originally formed part of the hedge of a meadow. In our trim and polished garden, they then remained, they were soon afterwards cut down, rude and obtuse, with something primeval about them, something autocranus. They were like two peasant ancestors surviving in a family that had advanced to gentility. They rose each out of a steep, turfed hillock, and the root of one of them was long my favorite summer reading desk. For I could lie stretched on the lawn, with my head and shoulders supported by the elm tree hillock, and the book in a fissure of the rough turf. Clither then, I escaped with my graveyard poets, and who shall explain the rapture with which I followed their austere morality? Whether I really read consecutively in my blackbound volume, I can no longer be sure. But it became a companion whose society I valued, and at worst it was a thousand times more congenial to me than Jukes's On the Pentateuch, or than a perfectly excruciating work ambiguously styled The Javelin of Phineus, which lay smoldering in a dull red cover on the drawing room table. I dipped my bucket here and there into my poets, and I brought up strange things. I brought up out of the depths of the last day, the following ejaculation of a soul roused by the trump of resurrection. Father of mercies, why from silent earth diths thou awake and curse me into birth? Tear me from quiet, ravish me from night, and make a thankless present of thy light. Push into being a reverse of thee, and animate a clod with misery. I read these lines with a shiver of excitement, and in a sense, I suppose little intended by the sagdemonious rector of Willwin. I also read in the same piece the surprising description of how now charnels rattle scattered limbs and all the various bones obsequious to the call self-moved, advanced, the neck perhaps to meet the distant head, the distant legs, the feet. But rejected it as not wholly supported by the testimony of Scripture. I think that the rhetoric and vigorous advance of young's verse were pleasant to me. Byel be portious, I discarded from the first as impenetrable. In the Deity, I knew nothing then of the life of its extravagant and preposterous author, I took a kind of persistent penitential pleasure. But it was Blair's grave that really delighted me, and I frightened myself with its melodious doleful images in earnest. About this time, there was a great flow of tea-table hospitality in the village, and my friends and their friends used to be asked out by respective parents, and by more than one little spinster, to faint little entertainments where those sang who were ambitious to sing and where all played post and forfeits after a rich tea. My father was constantly exercised in mind as to whether I should or should not accept these glittering invitations. There hovered before him a painful sense of danger in resigning the soul to pleasures which savored of the world. These, though apparently innocent in themselves, might give an appetite for yet more subversive dissipations. I remember on one occasion when the Browns, a family of Baptists who kept a large haberdashery shop in the neighboring town, asked for the pleasure of my company to tea and games, and carried complacency so far as to offer to send that local vehicle, the Midge, to fetch me and bring me back. My father's conscience was so painfully perplexed that he desired me to come up with him to the now-deserted boudoir of the departed Marx that we might lay the matter before the Lord. We did so, kneeling side by side with our backs to the window and our foreheads pressed upon the horsehair cover of the small coffin-like sofa. My father prayed aloud with great fervor that it might be revealed to me, by the voice of God, whether it was or was not the Lord's will that I should attend the Browns' party. My father's attitude seemed to me to be hardly fair since he did not scruple to remind the deity of various objections to a life of pleasure and of the snakes that lie hidden in the grass of evening parties. It would have been more scrupulous, I thought, to give no sort of hint of the kind of answer he desired and expected. It will be justly said that my life was made up of very trifling things since I have to confess that this incident of the Browns' invitation was one of its landmarks. As I knelt, feeling very small by the immense bulk of my father, there gushed through my veins like a wine, a determination to rebel. Never before in all these years of my vocation had I felt my resistance take precisely this definite form. We rose presently from the sofa, my forehead and the backs of my hands still chafed by the texture of a horsehair, and we faced one another in the dreary light. My father, perfectly confident in the success of what had really been a sort of incantation, asked me in a loud, weedling voice, Well, and what is the answer, which our Lord vowed saves? I said nothing, and so my father, more sharply, continued, We have asked him to direct you to a true knowledge of his will. We have desired him to let you know whether it is or is not, in accordance with his wishes, that you should accept this invitation from the Browns. He positively beamed down at me. He had no doubt of the reply. He was already, I believe, planning some little treat to make up to me for the material deprivation. But my answer came in the high piping accents of despair. The Lord says I may go to the Browns. My father gazed at me in speechless horror. He was caught in his own trap, and though he was certain that the Lord had said nothing of the kind, there was no road open for him but just sheer retreat. Yet surely it was an error in tactics to slam the door. It was at this party at the Browns, to which I duly went, although in sore disgrace, that my charnel poets played me a mean trick. It was proposed that our young friends should give their elders the treat of repeating any pretty pieces that they knew by heart. Accordingly, a little girl recited Casa Bianca, and another little girl, We Are Seven, and various children were induced to repeat hymns, some rather long as Calverly says, but all very mild and innocuously evangelical. I was then asked by Mrs. Brown's maiden sister, a gushing lady in corkscrew curls, who led the rebels, whether I also would not indulge them by repeating some sweet stanzas. No one more ready than I. Without a moment's hesitation, I stood forth, and in a loud voice, I began one of my favorite passages from Blair's grave. If death were nothing and not after death, if when men died at once they ceased to be, returning to the barren womb of nothing whence they first sprung, then might the debauchee, thank you, dear, that will do nicely, interrupted the lady with the curls. But that's only the beginning of it, I cry. Dear, but that will quite do. We won't ask you to repeat any more of it. And I withdrew to the borders of the company and bewilderment. Nor did the Browns or their visitors ever learn what it was the debauchee might have said or done in more favorable circumstances. The growing eagerness which I displayed for the society of selected school fellows and for such gentle dissipations as were within my reach, exercised my father greatly. His fancy rushed forward with the pace of a steam engine and saw me the life and soul of a gambling club or flaunting it at the mabeel. He had no confidence in the action of moderating powers and he was fond of repeating that the downward path is easy. If one fretted to be bathing with one's companions on the shingle and preferred this exercise to the study of God's word, it was a symbol of a terrible decline. The angle of which would grow steeper and steeper until one plunged into perdition. He was himself timid and reclusive and he shrieked from all avoidable companionship with others except on the footing of a master and teacher. My stepmother and I, who neither taught nor ruled, yearned for a looser chain and lighter relationships. With regard to myself, my father about this time hit on a plan from which he hoped much, but from which little resulted. He looked to George to supply what my temperament seemed to require of congenial juvenile companionship. If I have not mentioned George until now, it is not that he was a new acquaintance. When we first came down into the country, our sympathy had been called forth by an accident to a little boy who was knocked over by a horse and whose thigh was broken. Somebody, I suppose Mary Grace, since my father could rarely bring himself to pay these public visits, went to see the child in the infirmary and accidentally discovered that he was exactly the same age that I was. This and the fact that he was a meditative and sober little boy attracted us all still further to George, who became converted under one of my father's sermons. He attended my public baptism and was so much moved by the ceremony that he passionately desired to be baptized also and was, in fact, so immersed a few months later, slightly to my chagrin, since I, thereupon, ceased to be the only infant prodigy in communion. When we were both in our 13th year, George became an outdoor servant to us and did odd jobs under the gardener. My father, finding him, as he said, docile, obedient and engaging, petted George a good deal and taught him a little botany. He called George by a curious contortion of thought my spiritual foster brother and anticipated for him, I think, a career, like mine, in the ministry. Our garden suffered from an incursion of slugs, which laid the verbenas in the dust and shore off the carnations as if with pairs of scissors. To cope with this play, we invested in a drake and a duck who were christened Philemon and Bacchus. Every night, large cabbage leaves, containing the leaves of deer, were spread about the flower beds as traps and at dawn, these had become green parlors crammed with intoxicated slugs. One of George's earliest morning duties was to free Philemon and Bacchus from their coop and armed with a small wand to guide their footsteps to the feast in one cabbage leaf after another. My father used to watch this performance from an upper window and in moments of high facetiousness he was wont to parody the poet Gray. How George drove his team afield. This is all, or almost all, that I remember about George's occupations, but he was singularly blameless. My father's plan now was that I should form a close intimacy with George as a boy of my own age, of my own faith, of my own future. My stepmother, still in bondage to the social conventions, was passionately troubled at this and urged the barrier of class differences. My father replied that such an intimacy would keep me lowly and that from so good a boy as George I could learn nothing undesirable. He will encourage him not to wipe his boots when he comes into the house, said my stepmother, and my father sighed to think how narrow is the horizon of women's view of heavenly things. In this gupprice, if I may call it so, I think that my father had before him the fine republican example of Sanford and Merton, some parts of which book he admired extremely. Accordingly, George and I were sent out to take walks together, and as we started, my father, with an air of great benevolence, would suggest some passage of Scripture or some aspect of God's bountiful scheme and creation on which you may profitably meditate together. George and I never pursued the discussion of the text with which my father started us for more than a minute or two, then we fell into silence or investigated current scenes and rustic topics. As is natural among the children of the poor, George was precocious where I was infantile and underdeveloped where I was elaborate. Our minds could hardly find a point at which to touch. He gave me, however, under cross examination interesting hints about rural matters and I liked him, although I felt his company to be insipid. Sometimes he carried my books by my side to the larger and more distant school which I now attended, but I was always in a fever of dread lest my school fellows should see him and should accuse me of having to be brought to school. To explain to them that the companionship of this wholesome and rather blunt young peasant was part of my spiritual discipline would have been all beyond my powers. It was soon after this that my stepmother made her one vain effort to break through the stillness of our lives. My father's energy seemed to decline to become more fitful to take unreasonable directions. My mother instinctively felt that his peculiarities were growing upon him. He would scarcely stir from his microscope except to go to the chapel and he was visible to fewer and fewer visitors. She had taken a pleasure in his literary eminence and she was aware that this too would slip from him that so persistently kept out of sight he must soon be out of mind. I know not how she gathered courage for her tremendous effort but she took me, I recollect, into her councils. We were to unite to oblige my father to start to his feet and face the world. Alas, we might as well have attempted to rouse the summit of yes-tore into volcanic action. To a mother's arguments my father, with that baffling smile of his, replied, I esteem the reproach of Christ greater riches than the treasures of Egypt. And that this answer was indirect made it nonetheless conclusive. My mother wished him to give lectures, to go to London, to read papers before the Royal Society to enter into controversy with foreign savants, to conduct classes of outdoor zoology at fashionable watering places. I held my breath with admiration as she poured forth her scheme so daring, so brilliant, so sure to cover our great man with glory. He listened to her with an ambiguous smile and shook his head at us and resumed the reading of his Bible. At the date of which I write these pages the arts of illustration are so universally diffused that it is difficult to realize the darkness in which a remote English village was plunged half a century ago. No opportunity was offered to us dwellers in remote places of realizing the outward appearances of unfamiliar persons, scenes, or things. Although ours was perhaps the most cultivated household in the parish, I had never seen so much as a representation of a work of sculpture until I was 13. My mother then received from her earlier home certain volumes, among which was a gaudy gift book of some kind, containing a few steel engravings of statues. These attracted me violently, and here for the first time I gazed on Apollo with his proud gesture, Venus in her undulations, the curdled shape of Diana and Jupiter voluminously bearded. Very little information in that tome, not intelligible, was given in the text, but these were said to be figures of the Old Greek gods. I asked my father to tell me about these Old Greek gods. His answer was direct and disconcerting. He said, How I recollect the place and time early in the morning, as I stood beside the window at our garish breakfast room. He said that the so-called gods of the Greeks were the shadows cast by the vices of the heathen and reflected their infamous lives. It was for such things as these that God poured down brimstone and fire on the cities of the plain, and there's nothing in the legends of these gods, or rather devils, that is not better for a Christian not to know. His face blazed white with puritan fury, as he said this. I see him now in my mind's eye, in his violent emotion. You might have thought that he had himself escaped with horror from some Hellenic hippodrome. My father's prestige was by this time considerably lessened in my mind, and though I loved and admired him, I had now long ceased to hold him infallible. I did not accept his condemnation of the Greeks, although I bowed to it. In private, I returned to examine my steel engravings of the statues, and I reflected that they were too beautiful to be so wicked as my father thought they were. The dangerous and pagan notion that beauty paliates evil butted in my mind without any external suggestion. And by this reflection alone, I was still further sundered from the faith in which I had been trained. I gathered very diligently all I could pick up about the gods and their statues. It was not much. It was indeed ludicrously little and false, but it was a germ. And at this aesthetic juncture, I was drawn into what was really rather an extraordinary circle of incidents. Among the saints in our village, there lived a shoemaker and his wife, who had one daughter, Susan Flood. She was a flighty, excited young creature, and lately, during the passage of some itinerary revivalists, she had been converted in the noisiest way with sobs, gasps, and gurglings. When this crisis passed, she came with her parents to our meetings and was received quietly enough to the breaking of bread. But about the time I speak of, Susan Flood went up to London to pay a visit to an unconverted uncle and aunt. It was first whispered amongst us and then openly stated that these relatives had taken her to the Crystal Palace, where, in passing through the sculpture gallery, Susan's sense of decency had been so grievously affronted that she had smashed the naked figures with the handle of her parasol before her horrified companions could stop her. She had, in fact, run amok among the statuary and had, to the intense chagrin of her uncle and aunt, very worthy persons, been arrested and brought before a magistrate, who dismissed her with a warning to her relations that she had better be sent home to Devonshire and looked after. Susan Flood's return to us, however, was a triumph. She had no sense of having acted injudiciously or unbecomingly. She was ready to recount to everyone in vague, unveiled language how she had been able to testify for the Lord in the very temple of Belial, for so she poetically described the Crystal Palace. She was, of course, in a state of unbridled hysteria, but such physical explanations were not encouraged amongst us and the case of Susan Flood awakened a great deal of sympathy. There was held a meeting of the elders in our drawing room to discuss it, and I contrived to be present, though out of observation. My father, while he recognized the purity of Susan Flood's zeal, questioned its wisdom. He noted that the statuary was not her property, but that of the Crystal Palace. Of the other communicants, none, I think, had the very slightest notion what the objects were that Susan had smashed or tried to smash and, frankly, maintained that they thought her conduct magnificent. As for me, I had gathered by persistent inquiry enough information to know what her sacrilegious parasol had attacked were bodies of my mysterious friends, the Greek gods, and if all the rest of the village applauded iconoclastic Susan, I, at least, would be ardent on the other side. But I was conscious that there was nobody in the world to whom I could go for sympathy. If I had ever read Hellos, I should have murmured, Apollo, Pan, and Love, and even Olympian Job were weak when killing Susan, and layered on them. On the day in question, I was unable to endure the drawing room meeting to its close, but clutching my volume of the funereal poets, I made a dash for the garden. In the midst of a mass of laurels, clearing had been hollowed out where firms were grown and a garden seat was placed. There was no regular path to this asylum when dived under the snake-like boughs of a laurel and came up again in absolute seclusion. Into this haunt I now fled to meditate about the savage godliness of that vandal Susan Flood. So extremely ignorant was I that I supposed her to have destroyed the originals of the statues, marble and unique. I knew nothing about plaster casts and I thought the damage it is possible that there had really been no damage whatever was of an irreparable character. I sank into the seat with the great wall of laurels whispering around me, and I burst into tears. There was something truly quaint and pathetic in the figure of a little Plymouth brother sitting that advanced year of grace weeping bitterly for indignities done to her mes and to Aphrodite. Then I opened my book for consolation. I read a great block of pompous verse out of the deity in the midst of which exercise, yielding to the softness of the hot and aromatic air, I fell fast asleep. Among those who imploded the zeal of Susan Flood's parasol, the pageants were prominent. These were a retired Baptist minister and his wife from Exmouth who had lately settled amongst us and joined in the breaking of bread. Mr. Pageant was a fat old man whose round pale face was clean shaven and who carried a full crop of loose white hair above it. His large lips were always moving whether he spoke or not. He resembled, as I now perceive, the portraits of ST. Coleridge in age but with all the intellect left out of him. He lived in a sort of trance of solemn religious despondency. He had thrown up his cure of souls because he became convinced that he had committed the sin against the Holy Ghost. His wife was younger than he, very small, very tight, very active, with black eyes like pinpricks at the base of an extremely high and narrow forehead bordered with glossy ringlets. He was very cross to her and it was murmured that Dear Mrs. Pageant had often had to pass through the waters of affliction. They were very poor but rigidly genteel and she was careful, so far as she could, to conceal from the world the caprices of her poor lunatic husband. In our circle, it was never for a moment admitted that Mr. Pageant was a lunatic. It was said that he had gravely sinned and was under the Lord's displeasure. Prayers were abundantly offered up that he might be led back in light and that the smiling face might be drawn forth for him from behind the frowning providence. When the man had an epileptic seizure in the high street, he was not taken to a hospital but we repeated to one another with shaken heads that Satan, that crooked serpent, had been unloosed for a season. Mr. Pageant was fond of talking in private and in public of his dreadful spiritual condition and he would drop his voice while he spoke of having committed the unpardonable sin for the sort of shuddering exaltation such as people sometimes feel in the possession of a very unusual disease. It might be thought that the position held in any community by persons so afflicted and eccentric as the Pageants would be very precarious but it was not so with us. On the contrary, they took a prominent place at once. Mr. Pageant, despite his spiritual bankruptcy, was only too anxious to help my father in his administrations and used to beg to be allowed to pray and exhort. In the latter case, he took the tone of a wounded veteran who, though fallen on the bloody field himself, could still encourage younger warriors to march forward to victory. Everybody longed to know what the exact nature had been of that sin against the Holy Ghost which had deprived Mr. Pageant of hope for time and for eternity. It was whispered that even my father himself was not precisely acquainted with the character of it. This mysterious disability closed Mr. Pageant for us with a kind of romance. We watched him as the women watched Dante in Verona, whispering behold him how Hell's wreak has crisped his hair and singed his cheek. This person lacked, it is true, something of the dignity of Dante's for it was his caprice to walk up and down the high street at Noonday with one of those cascades of colored paper which were known as ornaments for your fireplace, slug over the back and another over the front of his body. The easy manufactured for sale and he adopted the quaint practice of wearing the exuberant objects as a means for their advertisement. Mrs. Pageant had made a custom to rule in the little ministry from which Mr. Pageant's celebrated sin with him and she was inclined to clutch at the scepter now. She was the only person I ever met with who was not afraid of the displeasure of my father. She would fix her viper colored eyes on his and say with a kind of gimlet firmness I hardly think that is the two interpretation brother G or but let us turn to Colossians and see what the Holy Ghost says there upon this matter. She fascinated my father who was not accustomed to this kind of interruption and as she was not to be softened by any flattery such as marvellous indeed sister is your acquaintance with the means of grace she became almost a terror to him. She abused her powers by taking great liberties which culminated in her drawing to his attention the fact that my poor stepmother displayed an overweening love of dress. The accusation was perfectly false. My stepmother was, if rather richly, always plainly dressed in the sober Quaker mode. Almost her only ornament was a large carnelian brooch set in flowered flat gold. To this the inventive pageant drew my father's attention as likely to lead the little ones of the flock into temptation. My poor father felt at his duty thus directly admonished to speak to my mother do you think my love that you should as one who sets an example to others discard the wearing of that gaudy brooch one must fasten one's collar with something I suppose? Well, but how does sister pageant fasten her collar? Sister pageant replied my mother stung at last into rejoinder fastens her collar with a pin and that is a thing which I would rather die than do or did I escape the attention of this zealous reformer? Mrs. pageant was good enough to take a great interest in me and she was not satisfied with the way in which I was being brought up. Her presence seemed to pervade the village and I could neither come in nor go out without seeing her hard bonnet and her pursed up lips. She would hasten to report to my father that she saw me laughing and talking with a lot of unconverted boys. These being the companions with whom I had full permission to bathe and boat. She urged my father to complete my holy vocation by some definite step by which he would dedicate me completely to the Lord's service. Further schooling she thought needless and merely likely to foster intellectual pride. Mr. pageant she remarked had troubled very little in his youth about worldly knowledge and yet how blessed he had been in the conversion of souls until he had occurred the displeasure of the Holy Ghost. I do not know exactly what she wanted my father to do with me. Perhaps she did not know herself. She was meddlesome, ignorant and fanatical and she liked to fancy that she was exercising influence. But the wonderful, the inexplicable thing is that my father who with all his limitations was so distinguished and high-minded should listen to her for a moment and still more wonderful it is that he really allowed her grim vixen that she was to disturb his plans and retard his purposes. I think the explanation lay in the perfectly logical position she took up. My father found himself brought face to face at last not with a disciple but with a trained expert in his own peculiar scheme of religion. At every point she was armed with arguments the source of which he knew and the validity of which he recognized. He trembled before Mrs. Padgett as a man in a dream may tremble before a parody of his own central self and he could not blame her without laying himself open somewhere to censure. My stepmother's instincts were more primitive and her actions less wire-drawn than my father's. She disliked Mrs. Padgett as much as one earnest believer can bring herself to dislike the sister in the Lord. My stepmother had quietly devoted herself to what she thought the best way of bringing me up and she did not propose now to be thwarted by the wife of a lunatic Baptist. At this time I was a mixture of childishness and priggishness of curious knowledge and dense ignorance. Certain portions of my intellect were growing with unwholesome activity while others were stunted as like a plant on which a pot has been placed with the effect that the center is crushed and arrested while shoots are straggling up to the light on all sides. My father himself was aware of this and in a spasmodic way he wished to regulate my thoughts but all he did was to try to straighten the shoots without removing the pot which kept them resolutely down. It was my stepmother who decided that I was now old enough to go to boarding school and my father having discovered that an elderly couple of Plymouth Brethren kept an academy for young gentlemen in a neighboring seaport town in the perspectives of which the knowledge and love of the Lord were mentioned as occupying the attention of the headmaster and his assistants far more closely than any mere considerations of worldly tuition was persuaded to entrust me to its care. He stipulated however that I should always come home from Saturday night to Monday morning not as he said that I might receive any carol indulgence but that there might be no cessation of my communion as a believer with the saints in our village on Sundays. To this school therefore I presently departed, gawky and homesick and the rift between my soul and that of my father widened a little more. End of chapter 11 Chapter 12 of Father and Son This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org Recording by Eugene Smith Father and Son by Edmund Goss Chapter 12 Little boys from quiet pious households commonly found in those days a chasm yawning at the feet of their inexperience when they arrived at boarding school. But the fact that I still slept at home on Saturday and Sunday nights preserved me, I fancy from many surprises. There was a crisis but it was broad and slow for me. On the other hand, for my father I am inclined to think that it was definite and sharp. Permission for me to desert the parental hearth even for five days in certain weeks was tantamount, in his mind, to admitting that the great scheme so long caressed so passionately fostered must in its primitive bigness be now dropped. The great scheme I cannot resist giving it the mortuary of capital letters had been, as my readers know that I should be exclusively and consecutively dedicated through the whole of my life to the manifest and uninterrupted and uncompromised service of the Lord. That had been the aspiration of my mother and at her death she had bequeathed that desire to my father like a dream of the promised land. In their ecstasy my parents had taken me as Elkhana and Hannah had long ago taken Samuel from their mountain home of Ramaphim Zofim down to sacrifice to the Lord of hosts in Shiloh. They had yurt me about with a linen effaud and had hoped to leave me there as long as he liveth they had said, he shall be lent unto the Lord. Doubtless in the course of these 14 years it had occasionally flashed upon my father as he overheard some speech of mine or detected some idiosyncrasy that I was not one of those whose temperament points them out as ultimately fitted for an austere life of religion. What he hoped, however, was that when the little roughnesses of childhood were rubbed away there would pass a deep mellowness over my soul. He had a touching way of condoning my faults of conduct directly after reproving them and he would softly deprecate my frailty saying, in a tone of harrowing tenderness, are you not the child of many prayers? He continued to think that prayer, such passionate important at prayer as his must prevail. Faith could move mountains. Should it not be able to mow the little ductile heart of a child since he was sure that his own faith was unfaltering? He had yearned and waited for a son who should be totally without human audacities who should be humble, pure not troubled by worldly agitations a son whose life should be cleansed and straightened from above in custodian, though, ceremonies day in whom everything should be sacrificed except the one thing needful to salvation. How such a marvel of lowly piety was to earn a living whenever, I think, occurred to him. My father was singularly indifferent about money. Perhaps his notion was that totally devoid of ambition as I was to be, I should quietly become adult and continue his ministrations among the poor of the Christian flock. He had some dim dream, I think, of there being just enough for us all without my having to take up any business or trade. I believe it was immediately after my first term at boarding school that I was a silent but indignant witness of a conversation between my father and Mr. Thomas Brightwen, my stepmother's brother who was a banker in one of the eastern counties. This question what is he to be in a worldly sense was being discussed and I'm sure it was for the first time at all events in my presence. Mr. Brightwen, I fancy had been worked upon by my stepmother whose affection for me was always on the increase to suggest or faintly to stir the air in the neighborhood of suggesting a query about my future. He was childless and so was she and I think a kind impulse led them to feel the way as it is called. I believe he said that the banking business wisely and honorably conducted sometimes led as we know that it is apt to lead to affluence. To my horror my father with rising emphasis replied that if there were offered to his beloved child what is called an opening that would lead to an income of 10,000 pounds a year and that would divert his thoughts and interest from the Lord's work he would reject it on his child's behalf. Mr. Brightwen a precise and polished gentleman who evidently never made an exaggerated statement in his life was, I think, faintly scandalized. He soon left us and I do not recollect his paying us a second visit. For my silent part I felt very much like Ghazi and I would fain have followed after the banker if I had dared to do so into the night. I would have excused to him the ardor of my Alicia and I would have reminded him of the sons of the prophets give me I pray thee I would have said a talent of silver and two changes of garments. It seemed to me very hard that my father should dispose of my possibilities of wealth in so summery a fashion but the fact that I did resented and regretted what I supposed to be my chance shows how far apart we had already swung. My father, I am convinced thought he gave words to my inward instincts when he repudiated the very mild and inconclusive benevolence of his brother-in-law but he certainly did not do so. I was conscious of a sharp and instinctive disappointment at having had as I fancied wealth so near my grasp and at seeing it all cast violently into the sea of my father's scruples. Not one of my village friends attended the boarding school to which I was now attached and I arrived there without an acquaintance. I should soon however have found a corner of my own if my father had not unluckily stipulated that I was not to sleep in the dormitory with the boys of my own age but in the room occupied by the two older sons of a prominent Plymouth brother whom he knew. From a social point of view this was an unfortunate arrangement since these youths were some years older and many years riper than I. The eldest in fact was soon to leave. They had enjoyed their independence and they now greatly resented being saddled with the presence of an unknown urchin. The supposition had been that they would protect and foster my religious practices. It would encourage me indeed, as my father put it, to approach the throne of grace with them at morning and evening prayer. They made no pretence however and oddly, they looked upon me as an intruder and after a while the younger and ruder of them openly let me know that they believed I had been put into their room to spy upon them. It had been a plot they knew between their father and mine and he darkly warned me that I should suffer if anything got out. I had however no wish to trouble them nor any faint interest in their affairs. I soon discovered that they were absorbed in a silly kind of amorous correspondence with the girls of a neighboring academy but what were all such toys to me? These young fellows who ought long before to have left the school did nothing overtly unkind to me but they condemned me to silence. They ceased to address me except within an occasional command. By reason of my youth I was in bed and asleep before my companions arrived upstairs and in the morning I was always routed up and packed about my business while they still were drowsing. But the fact that I had been cut off from my co-evils by night cut me off from them also by day so that I was nothing to them neither a boarder nor a day scholar neither flesh nor fowl. The loneliness of my life was extreme and that I always went home on Saturday afternoon and returned on Monday morning still further checked my companionships at school. For a long time around the outskirts of that busy throng of opening lives I wandered lonely as a cloud and sometimes I was more unhappy than I had ever been before. No one, however, bullied me and though I was dimly and indefinably witness to acts of uncleanness and cruelty I was the victim of no such acts and the recipient of no dangerous confidences. I suppose that my queer reputation for sanctity, half dreadful half ridiculous, surrounded me with a non-conducting atmosphere. We are the victims of hallowed proverbs and one of the most classic of these tells us that a child is father of the man. But in my case I cannot think of him. In mature years I've always been gregarious a lover of my kind dependent upon the company of friends with a very pulsing moral life. To be marooned to be shut up in a solitary cell to inhabit a lighthouse or to camp alone in a forest these have always seen to me afflictions too heavy to be born even in imagination. A state in which conversation exists not for me an air too empty of oxygen for my lungs to breathe it. Yet when I look back upon my days at boarding school I see myself unattracted by any of the human beings around me. My grown up years are made luminous to me in memory by the ardent faces of my friends but I can scarce recall so much as the names of more than two or three of my school fellows there is not one of them whose mind or whose character made any lasting impression upon me. In later life I have been impatient of solitude and afraid of it. At school I ask for no more than to slip out of the hurly burly and be alone with my reflections and my fancies. That magnetism of humanity which has been the agony of mature years of this I had not a trace when I was a boy of those fragile loves to which most men look back with tenderness emotions to be explained only as Montaigne explained them Parsque c'était lui Parsque c'était moi I knew nothing. I, to whom friendship has since been like sunlight and like sleep, left school unbrightened and unrefreshed by commerce with a single friend. If I had been clever I should doubtless have attracted the jealousy of my fellows but I was spared this by the mediocrity of my success in the classes. One little fact I may mention because it exemplifies the advance in observation which has been made in 40 years. I was extremely nearsighted and in consequence was placed at a gross disadvantage by being unable to see the slate or the blackboard on which our tasks were explained. It seems almost incredible when one reflects upon it but during the whole of my school life was never commented upon or taken into account by a single person until the Polish lady who taught us the elements of German and French drew someone's attention to it in my 16th year. I was not quick but I passed from being denser than I was because of the myopic haze that enveloped me but this is not an autobiography and with the cold and shrouded details of my uninteresting school life I will not fatigue the reader. I was not content however to be the cipher that I found myself and when I had been at school for about a year I broke out greatly I think to my own surprise in a popular act. We had a young usher whom we disliked I suppose poor half-star physique lad that he was the most miserable of us all. He was I think unfitted for the task which had been forced upon him. He was fretful unsympathetic agitated. The school house an old rambling place possessed a long cellar-like room that opened from our general corridor and was lighted by deep windows carefully barred which looked into an inner garden. This vault was devoted to us and to our playboxes. By a tacit law no master entered it. One evening just at dusk a great number of us were here when the bell for night school rang and many of us dawdled at the summons. Mr. B tactless in his anger bustled in among us scolding in a shrill voice and proceeded to drive us forth. I was the latest to emerge and as he turned away to see if any other truant might not be hiding I determined upon action with a quick movement I drew the door behind me and bolted it just in time to hear the imprisoned usher scream with vexation. We boys all trooped upstairs and it is characteristic of my isolation that I had not one chum to whom I could confide my feet. That Mr. B had been shut in became however almost instantly known in the night class, usually so unruly was awed by the event into exemplary decorum. There with no master near us in a silence rarely broken by a giggle or a cat-call we sat diligently working or pretending to work through my brain as I hung over my book a thousand new thoughts began to surge I was the liberator the tyrannicide I had freed all my fellows from the odious oppressor surely when they learned that it was I they would cluster around me surely now I should be somebody in the school life no longer a mere trotting shadow or invisible presence the interval seemed long at length Mr. B was released by a servant and he came up into the school room to find us in that ominous condition of suspense at first he said nothing he sank upon a chair in a half fainting attitude while he pressed his hand to his side his distress and silence redoubled the prize and filled me with something like remorse for the first time I reflected that he was human that perhaps he suffered he rose presently and took a slate upon which he wrote two questions did you do it do you know who did and these he propounded to each boy in rotation the prompt redoubled no in every case seemed to pile up his despair and one of the last whom he held in silence the trembling slate was the perpetrator as I saw the moment approach an unspeakable timidity swept over me I reflected that no one had seen me that no one could accuse me nothing could be easier or safer than to deny nothing more perplexing to the enemy nothing less perilous for the culprit a flood of plausible reasons invaded my brain I seemed to see this to be a case in which to tell the truth would be not merely foolish it would be wrong yet when the usher stood before me holding the slate out in his white and shaking head I seized the pencil and ignoring the first question I wrote yes firmly against the second I suppose that the ambiguity of this action puzzled Mr. B he pressed me to answer did you do it but to that I was obstinately dumb in a way I was hurried to an empty bedroom where for the whole of that night in the next day I was held a prisoner visited at intervals by the headmaster and other inquisitorial persons until I was gradually persuaded to make a full confession an apology this absurd little incident had one effect it revealed me to my school fellows as an existence from that time forth I lay no longer under the stigma of invisibility I had produced my material shape and had thrown my shadow for a moment into a legend but in other aspects things went on much as before curiously uninfluenced by my surroundings I in my turn failed to exercise influence and my practical isolation was no less than it had been before it was thus that it came about that my social memories of my boarding school life are monotonous and vague it was a period during which as it appears to me now on looking back the stream of my spiritual nature spread out into a shallow pool which was almost stagnant I was laboring to gain those elements of conventional knowledge which had in many cases up to that time been singularly lacking but my brain was starved and my intellectual perceptions were veiled elder persons who in later years would speak to me frankly of my school days assured me that while I had often struck them as a smart and quaint and even interesting child all promise seemed to fade out of me as a schoolboy and that those who were most inclined to be indulgent gave up the hope that I should prove a man in any way remarkable this was particularly the case with the most indulgent of my protectors my refined and gentle stepmother as this record can however have no value that is not based on its rigorous adhesion to the truth I am bound to say that the dreariness and sterility of my school life were more apparent than real pursuing certain lines of moral and mental development all the time and since my school masters and my school fellows combined in thinking me so dull I will display a tardy touch of proper spirit and ask whether it may not partly have been because they were themselves so commonplace I think that if some drops of sympathy that magic dew of paradise had fallen upon my desert it might have blossomed like the rose or in all events like that chimerical flower the rose of Jericho as it was a conventionality around me the intellectual drought gave me no opportunity of outward growth they did not destroy but they cooped up and rendered slow and inefficient that internal life which continued as I have said to live on unseen this took the form of dreams and speculations the course of which I went through many tortuous processes of the mind the actual aims of which were futile although the movements themselves were useful if I may more minutely define my meaning I would say that in my school days without possessing thoughts I yet prepared my mind for thinking and learned how to think the great subject of my curiosity at this time was words of expression I was incessant in adding to my vocabulary and in finding accurate and individual terms for things here too the exercise preceded the employment since I was busy providing myself with words before I had any ideas to express with them when I read Shakespeare and came upon the passage in which Prospero tells Caliban that he had no thoughts until his master taught him words and with amazement at the poet's intuition for such a Caliban had I been I pitied thee took pains to make thee speak taught thee each hour one thing or other when thou didst not savage know thine own meaning thou wouldst gabble like a thing most brutish I endowed thy purposes with words that made them know for my Prospero's I saw it vaguely in such books as to and I was conscious that as the inevitable word seized hold of me with it out of the darkness into strong light came the image and the idea my father possessed a copy of Bailey's etymological dictionary a book published early in the 18th century over this I would pour for hours playing with the words in a fashion which I can no longer reconstruct and delighting in the saber of the country phrases my father finding me thus employed fell to wondering at the nature of my pursuit and I could offer him indeed no very intelligible explanation of it he urged me to give up such idleness and to make practical use of language for this purpose he conceived an exercise which he obliged me to adopt although it was hateful to me he sent me forth it might be up the lane to Warbury Hill and around home by the cops or else down one kind to the sea and along the shingle to the next cutting in the cliff and so back by way of the village and he desired me to put down in language as full as I could all that I had seen in each excursion as I have said this practice was detestable and irksome to me but as I look back I am inclined to believe it to have been the most salutary the most practical piece of training which my father ever gave me it forced me to observe sharply and clearly to form visual impressions to retain them in the brain and to clothe them in punctilious and accurate language it was in my 15th year that I became again this time intelligently acquainted with Shakespeare I got hold of a single play a tempest in a school edition prepared I suppose for the university examinations which were then being instituted in the provinces this I read through and through not disdaining the help of the notes and reveling in the glossary I studied the tempest as I had hitherto studied no classic work and it filled my whole being with music and romance this book was my own hoarded possession the rest of Shakespeare's works were beyond my hopes usually I contrived to borrow a volume here and a volume there I completed The Merchant of Venice Red Symboline Julius Caesar and Much Adieu most of the others I think remained closed to me for a long time but these were enough to steep my horizon with all the colors of sunrise it was due no doubt to my bringing up that the plays never appeal to me as bounded by the exigencies of stage or played by actors the images they raised in my mind were of real people moving in the open air and uttering, in the natural play of life sentiments that were clothed in the most lovely and yet as it seemed to me the most obvious and the most inevitable language it was while I was thus under the full spell of the Shakespearean necromancy that a significant event occurred my father took me up to London for the first time since my infancy our visit was one of a few days only and its purpose was that we might take part in some enormous evangelical conference we stayed in a dark hotel off the strand where I found the noise by day and night very afflicting when we were not at the conference I spent long hours among crumbs and blue bottle flies in the coffee room of this hotel my father being busy at the British Museum of Royal Royal Society the conference was held in an immense hall somewhere in the north of London I remember my short-sighted sense of the terrible vastness of the crowd with the rings on rings of dim white faces fading in the fog my father, as a privileged visitor was obliged with seats on the platform and we were in the heart of the first really large assemblage of persons that I had ever seen the interminable ritual of prayers hymns and addresses left no impression on my memory that my attention was suddenly stung into life by a remark an elderly man fat and greasy with a voice like a bassoon in an imperturbable assurance was denouncing the spread of infidelity and the lukewarmness of professing Christians who refrained from battling with the wickedness at their doors they were like the leodicians whom the angel of the apocalypse spewed out of his mouth for instance who, the orator asked is now rising to check the outburst of idolatry in our midst at this very moment he went on, there is proceeding unreproved, a blasphemous celebration of the birth of Shakespeare a lost soul now suffering for his sins in hell my sensation was that of one who has suddenly been struck on the head stars and sparks beat around me if some person I loved had been grossly insulted in my presence I could not have felt more powerless in anguish no one in that vast audience raised a word of protest and my spirits fell to their nadir this, be it remarked was the earliest intimation that had reached me the first centenary of the birth at Stratford and I had not the least idea what could have provoked the outburst of outraged godliness but Shakespeare was certainly in the air when we returned to the hotel that noon my father, of his own accord reverted to the subject I held my breath prepared to endure fresh torment what he said however surprised and relieved me however so-and-so he remarked was not in my judgment justified in saying what he did the uncommonent and mercies of god are not revealed to us before so rashly speaking of Shakespeare as a lost soul in hell he should have remembered how little we know of the poet's history the light of salvation was widely disseminated in the land during the reign of Queen Elizabeth and we cannot know that Shakespeare did not accept the atonement of Christ in simple faith before he came to die the concession will today seem meager to gay and worldly spirits but words cannot express how comfortable it was to me I gazed at my father with loving eyes across the cheese and celery and if the waiter had not been present I believe I might have hugged him in my arms this anecdote may serve to illustrate the attitude of my conscience at the time with regard to theology I was not consciously in any revolt against the strict faith in which I had been brought up but I could not fail to be aware of the fact that literature tempted me to stray up innumerable paths which meandered in directions at right angles to that direct straight way which leadeth to salvation I fancied if I may pursue the image that I was still safe up these pleasant lanes if I did not stray far enough to lose sight of the main road if for instance it had been quite certain that Shakespeare had been irrecoverably damnable and damned it was scarcely had been possible for me to have justified myself in going on reading Symboline one who broke bread with the saints every Sunday morning who took a class at Sunday school who made as my father loved to remind me a public weekly confession of his willingness to bear the cross of Christ such in one could hardly however bewildering and torturing the thought continue to admire a lost soul but that happy possibility of an ultimate repentance how it eased me I could always console myself with the belief that when Shakespeare wrote any passage of intoxicating beauty it was just then that he was beginning to breathe the rapture that faith in Christ to the anointed soul and it was with a light casuistry that I condoned my other intellectual and personal pleasures my father continued to be under the impression that my boarding school which he never again visited after originally leaving me there was conducted upon the same principles as his own household I was frequently tempted to enlighten him but I never found the courage to do so in fact the piety of the establishment which collected to it the sons of a large number of evangelical minded parents throughout that part of the country resided mainly in the prospectus it proceeded no further than the practice of reading the bible aloud each boy in successive order one verse in the early morning before breakfast there was no selection and no exposition where the last boy sat and ended even if it were in the middle of a sentence and there it began next morning such reading of the chapter was followed by a long dry prayer I do not know that this morning service would appear more perfunctory than usual to other boys but it astounded and disgusted me accustomed as I was to the ministrations at home where my father read the word of God in a loud passionate voice with dramatic emphasis pausing for commentary and paraphrase and treating every phrase as if it were part of a personal message or of thrilling family history at school morning prayer was a dreary unintelligible exercise and with this piece of mumbo-jumbo religion for the day began and ended the discretion of little boys is extraordinary I'm quite certain no one of us ever revealed this fact to our godly parents at home if anyone was to do this it was of course I who should first of all have testified but I had grown cautious about making confidences one never knew how awkwardly they might develop or to what disturbing excesses of zeal they might precipitously lead I was on my guard against my father who was all the time only too openly yearning that I should approach him for help, for comfort for ghostly counsel still delicate though steadily gaining in solidity of constitution I was liable to severe chills and to fugitive neurologic pangs my father was almost maddeningly desirous that these afflictions should be sanctified to me and it was in my bed often when I was much bowed by the spirit by indisposition that he used to triumph over me most pitilessly he retained the singular superstition amazing in a man of scientific knowledge and long human experience that all pains and ailments were directly sent by the lord in chastisement for some definite fault and not in relation to any physical cause the result was sometimes quite startling and in particular I recollect that my stepmother and I exchanged impressions of astonishment at my father's action when mrs. Goodyear who was one of the saints and the wife of a young journeyman cobbler broke her leg my father puzzled for an instant as to the meaning of this accident since mrs. Goodyear was the gentlest and most inoffensive of our church members decided that it must be because she had made an idol of her husband and he reduced the poor thing to tears by standing at her bedside and imploring the holy spirit to bring this sin home to her conscience when therefore I was ill at home with one of my trifling disorders the problem of my spiritual state always pressed violently upon my father and this caused me no little mental amaziness he would appear at my bedside with solemn solicitude and sinking on his knees would earnestly pray aloud that the purpose of the lord in sending me this affliction might graciously be made plain to me and then rising and standing by my pillow he would put me through a searching spiritual inquiry as to the fault which was thus divinely indicated to me as observed and reprobated on high it was not on points of moral behavior that he thus cross-examined me I think he disdains such a noble gain as that but uncertainties of doctrine relinquishment of faith in the purity of this dogma or of that lukewarm zeal in taking up the cross of Christ growth in intellectual pride such were the insidious offenses in consequence of which, as he supposed the cold in the head or the toothache had been sent as heavenly messengers to recall my straggling conscience to its plain path of duty what made me very uncomfortable on these occasions was my consciousness that confinement to bed was hardly an affliction at all it kept me from the boredom of school in a fire-lit bedroom at home with my pretty smiling stepmother lavishing luxurious attendance upon me and it gave me long unbroken days for reading I was awkwardly aware that I simply had not the effrontery to approach the throne of grace with a request to know for what sin I was condemned to such a very pleasant disposition of my hours the current of my life ran during my school days most merrily and fully in the holidays when I resumed my outdoor exercises with those friends in the village of whom I have spoken earlier I think they were more refined and better bred than any of my school fellows at all events it was among these homely companions alone that I continued to form congenial and sympathetic relations in one of these boys one of whom I have heard or seen nothing now for nearly a generation I found taste singularly parallel to my own and we scoured the horizon in search of books and prose and verse but particularly in verse as I grew stronger in muscle I was capable of adding considerably to my income by an exercise of my legs I was allowed money for the railway ticket between the town where the school lay and the station nearest to my home but if I chose to walk six or seven miles along the coast thus more than having the distance by rail from school house to home I might spend as pocket money the railway fare I thus saved such considerable sums I fostered in order to buy with them poets these were not in those days as they are now at the beck and call of every purse and the attainment of each little masterpiece was a separate triumph in particular I shall never forget the excitement of reaching at length the exorbitant price the bookseller asked for the only although imperfect edition of the poems of ST Coleridge at last I could meet his demand and my friend and I went down to consummate the solemn purchase coming away with our treasure we read aloud from the orange colored volume in turns as we strolled along until at last we sat down on the bulging root of an elm tree in a secluded lane here we stayed in a sort of poetical Nirvana reading forgetting the passage of time until the hour of our neglected midday meal was a long while passed and we had to hurry home to bread and cheese and a scolding there was occasionally some trouble about my reading but now not much nor often I was rather adroit and careful not to bring prominently into sight anything of a literary kind which could become a stone of stumbling but when I was nearly 16 I made a purchase which brought me into sad trouble and was the cause of a permanent wound to my self-respect I had long coveted in the bookshop window a volume in which the poetical works of Ben Johnson and Christopher Marlowe were said to be combined this I bought at length and I carried it with me to devour as I trod the desolate road that brought me along the edge of the cliff on Saturday afternoons of Ben Johnson I could make nothing but when I turned to hero in Leander I was lifted to a heaven of passion and music it was a marvelous revelation of romantic beauty to me and as I paced along that lonely and exquisite highway with its immense command of the sea and its peeps every now and then through slanting thickets far down to the snow white shingle I lifted up my voice singing the verses as I strolled along buskins of shells all silvered used she and branched with blushing coral to the knee where sparrows perched of hollow pearl and gold such as the world would wonder to behold so it went on and I thought I had never read anything so lovely Amorous Leander beautiful and young whose tragedy divine museus sung it all seemed to my fancy intoxicating beyond anything I had ever even dreamed of since I had not yet become acquainted with many of the modern romanticists when I reached home tired out with enthusiasm and exercise I must needs as soon as I had eaten search out my stepmother that she might be a partner in my joys it is remarkable to me now and a disconcerting proof of my still almost infantile innocence that having induced her to settle to her knitting I began without hesitation to read Marlowe's voluptuous poem allowed to that blameless Christian gentlewoman we got on very well in the opening but at the episode of Cupid's pining my stepmother's needles began nervously to clash and when we launched on the description of Leander's person she interrupted me by saying rather sharply give me that book please I should like to read the rest to myself I resigned the reading in amazement and was stupefied to see her take the volume shut it with a snap and hide it under her needlework nor could I extract from her another word on the subject the matter passed from my mind and I was therefore extremely alarmed when soon after my going to bed that night I was in the room with a pale face and burning eyes a prey of violent perturbation he sat down the candle and stood by the bed and it was some time before he could resolve on a form of speech then he denounced me in unmeasured terms for bringing into the house for possessing an all or reading so abominable a book he explained that my stepmother had shown it to him and had burned it the sentence in his tirade which principally affected me was this he said you will soon be leaving us and going up to lodgings in London and if your landlady should come into your room and find such a book lying about she would immediately set you down as a profligate I did not understand this at all and it seems to me now that the fact that I had so very simply volunteered to read the verses to my stepmother should have proved to my father that I connected it with no ideas of an immoral nature I was greatly wounded and offended but my indignation was smothered up in the alarm and excitement which followed the news that I was going to go up to live in lodgings and as it was evident alone in London of this no hint or whisper had previously reached me on reflection I can but admit that my father who is a little accustomed to 17th century literature must have come across some startling exposures in Ben Johnson and probably never reached hero and Leander at all the artistic effect of such poetry on an innocently pagan mind did not come within the circle of his experience he judged the outspoken Elizabethan poets no doubt very much in the spirit of the problematical landlady of the world outside of the dim wild whirlpool of London I was much afraid but I was now ready to be willing to leave the narrow Devonshire circle to see the last of the red mud of the dreary village street of the plethoric elders to hear the last of the drawing voices of the saints yet I had a great difficulty in persuading myself that I could ever be happy away from home and again I compared my lot with that of one of the speckled soldier crabs that roamed about in my father's aquarium dragging after the great rural shells they, if by chance they were turned out of their welk habitations trailed about a pale soft body in search of another house visibly broken hearted in the victims of every ignominious accident my spirits were divided pathetically between the wish to stay on a guarded child and to proceed into the world a budding man and in my utter ignorance I sought in vain to conjure up what my immediate future would be my father threw no light upon the subject for he had not formed any definite idea of what I could possibly do to earn an honest living as a matter of fact I was to stay another year at school and home this last year my boyish life passed rapidly and pleasantly my sluggish brain waked up at last and I was able to study with application in the public examinations I did pretty well and may even have been fought something of a credit to the school yet I formed no close associations and I even contrived to avoid as I had afterwards occasion to regret such lessons as were distasteful to me and therefore particularly valuable but I read with unchecked voracity and in several curious directions Shakespeare now passed into my possession and tire in the shape of a reprint more hideous and more offensive to the eyesight than would in these days appear conceivable I made acquaintance with Keats who entirely captivated me with Shelley whose Queen Mab at first repelled me from the threshold of his edifice and with Wordsworth for the exercise of whose magic I was still far too young my father presented me with the entire bulk of Suddhi's stone evers which I found it impossible to penetrate but my stepmother lent me the golden treasury in which almost everything seemed exquisite upon this extension of my intellectual powers however there did not follow any spirit of doubt or hostility to the faith on the contrary first there came a considerable quickening of fervor my prayers became less frigid and mechanical I no longer avoided as far as possible the contemplation of religious ideas I began to search the scriptures for myself with interest and sympathy if scarcely with ardor I began to perceive without animosity the strange narrowness of my father's system which seemed to take into consideration only a selected circle of persons a group of disciples peculiarly illuminated and to have no message whatever for the wider Christian community on this subject I had some instructive conversations with my father whom I found not reluctant to have his convictions pushed to their logical extremity he did not wish to judge he protested and he could not admit that a single Unitarian or Sosinian as he preferred to say redeemed and he had no hope of eternal salvation for the inhabitants of Catholic countries I recollect his speaking of Austria he questioned whether a single Austrian subject except as he said here and there a pious and extremely ignorant individual who had not comprehended the errors of the papacy but had humbly studied his bible could hope to find eternal life he thought that the ordinary Chinaman or savage native of Fiji had a better chance of salvation than any cardinal in the Vatican and even in the priesthood of the Church of England he believed that while many were called few indeed would be found to have been chosen I could not sympathize even in my then state of ignorance with so rigid a conception of the divine mercy little inclined as I was to be skeptical I still thought it impossible that a secret of such dependence importance should have been entrusted to a little group of Plymouth brethren that have been hidden from millions of disinterested and pious theologians that the leaders of European Christianity were sincere my father did not attempt to question but they were all of them wrong incorrect and no matter how holy their lives how self-sacrificing their actions they would have to suffer for their inexactitude through eons of undefined torment he would speak with a solemn complacency of the aged nun who after a long life of renunciation and devotion died at last only to discover her mistake he who was so tender hearted that he could not bear to witness the pain or distress of any person however disagreeable or undeserving was quite acquiescent in believing that God would punish human beings in millions however were a purely intellectual error of comprehension my father's inconsistencies of perception seemed to me to have been the result of a curious irregularity of equipment taking for granted as he did the absolute integrity of the scriptures and applying to them his trained scientific spirit he contrived to stifle with the deplorable success alike a function of the imagination a sense of moral justice and his own deep and instinctive tenderness of heart there presently came over me a strong desire to know what doctrine indeed it was that the other churches taught I expressed a wish to be made aware of the practices of Rome or at least of Canterbury and I longed to attend the Anglican and the Roman services but to do so was impossible my father did not indeed forbid me to enter the fine parish church of our village or the stately Puginesque cathedral which Rome had just directed at its side but I knew that I could not be seen at either service without his immediately knowing it or without his being deeply wounded although I was 16 years of age and although I was treated with indulgence and affection I was still but a bird fluttering in the network of my father's will an incapable of the smallest independent action I resigned all thought of attending any other services than those at our room but I did no longer regard this exclusion as a final one I bowed but it was in the house of Riman from which I now knew that I must inevitably escape all the liberation however which I desired or dreamed of was only just so much as would bring me into communion with the outer world of Christianity without divesting me of the pure and simple principles of faith of so much emancipation indeed I now became ardently desirous and in the contemplation of it I rose to a more considerable degree of religious fervor that I had ever reached before or was ever to experience later our thoughts were at this time abundantly exercised with the expectation of the immediate coming of the Lord who as my father and those who thought with him believed would suddenly appear without the least warning and would catch up to be with him in everlasting glory all whom acceptance of the atonement had sealed for immortality these were on the whole not numerous and our belief was that the world after a few days amazement at the total disappearance of these persons would revert to its customary habits of life merely sinking more rapidly into a moral corruption due to the removal of these souls of salt this event an examination of prophecy had led my father to regard as absolutely imminent and sometimes when we parted for the night he would say with a sparkling rapture in his eyes who knows we may meet next in the air with all the cohorts of God's saints this conviction I shared without a doubt and indeed in perfect indecency I hope but perhaps with a touch of slinus too I proposed at the end of the summer holidays that I should stay at home what is the use of my going to school let me be with you when we rise to meet the Lord in the air to this my father sharply and firmly replied that it was our duty to carry on our usual allocations to the last I do not the moment of this coming and we should be together in an instant on that day how far so ever we might be parted upon earth I was ashamed but his argument was logical and as it proved judicious my father lived for nearly a quarter of a century more never losing the hope of not tasting death and as the last moments of mortality approached he was bitterly disappointed in what he held to be an anti-reward of his long faith and patience but if my own life's work had been as I proposed shelved in expectation of the Lord's imminent advent I should have cumbered the ground until this day to school therefore I returned with a brain full of strange discord in a huddled mixture of Andemian in the book of Revelation John Wesley's hymns in Midsummer Night's Dream a few boys of my age I suppose carried about with them such a confused throng of immature impressions and contradictory hopes I was at one moment devoutly pious at the next haunted by visions of material beauty and longing for sensuous impressions in my hot and silly brain Jesus and Pan held sway together as in a wayside chapel discordantly and impishly consecrated to pagan and to Christian rites but for the present as in the great chorus which so marvelously portrays our double nature the folding star of Bethlehem was still dominant I became more and more a pietistic beginning now to versify I wrote a tragedy and pale limitation of Shakespeare but on a biblical and evangelistic subject and oaths that were parodies of those unbound but dealt with the approaching advent of our Lord and the rapture of his saints my unwholesome excitement mumbling up in this violent way reached at last a climax and foamed over it was a summer afternoon being now left very free in my movements I had escaped from going out with the rest of my school fellows in their formal walk in charge of an usher I had been reading a good deal of poetry but my heart had translated Apollo and Bapus into terms of an exalted Christian faith I was alone and I lay on a sofa drawn across a large open window at the top of the schoolhouse in a room which was used as a study by the boys who were going up for examination I gazed down on a labyrinth of gardens sloping to the sea which twinkled faintly beyond the towers of the town these gardens held a villa in it but all the near landscape below me was drowned in foliage a wonderful warm light of approaching sunset modeled the shadows and set the broad summits of the trees in a rich glow there was an absolute silence below and around me a magic of suspense seemed to keep every topmost twig from waving over my soul there swept an immense wave of emotion now, surely now the great final change must be approaching I gazed up into the tenderly colored sky and I broke irresistibly into speech come now Lord Jesus I cried come now and take me to be forever with thee in thy paradise I am ready to come my heart is purged from sin there is nothing that keeps me rooted to this wicked world now, now and take me before I have known the temptations of life before I have to go to London and all the dreadful things that happened there and I raised myself on the sofa and leaned upon the window sill and waited for the glorious apparition this was the highest moment of my religious life the apex of my striving after holiness I waited a while watching and then I felt a faint shame at the theatrical attitude I had adopted although I was alone still I gazed and still I hoped then a little breeze sprang up and the branches danced sounds began to rise from the road beneath me presently the color deepened the evening came on from far below there rose to me the chatter of the boys returning home the tea bell rang last word of prose to shatter the mystical poetry the Lord has not come the Lord will never come I muttered and in my heart the artificial edifice of extravagant faith began to totter and crumble from that moment forth my father and I though the fact was long successfully concealed from him and even from myself walked in opposite hemispheres of the soul with the thick of the world between us End of Chapter 12