Page:Life of William Blake 2, Gilchrist.djvu/469

 Rh a beaten track reason and conscience refused to tread. But not without a severe mental conflict was this decision arrived at; a conflict which, added as it was to arduous mental labours, to his duties as a preacher, and as tutor to some private pupils, residing in his house, resulted in an attack of brain-fever that permanently shattered his strength. He rose from the sick bed calm and determined. The storm within was over; a storm without began. To resign the ministry was to resign the chief means of support for his wife and children, now seven in number; to lose many warm friends; to be bitterly assailed by kith and kin, whose notions of worldly prudence and sectarian bigotry were alike outraged by his decision. But, put what you might into the other scale, James Gilchrist's was not the kind of conscience to kick the beam; nor happily was his wife one to shrink from or murmur at the consequences which might ensue, though she herself remained a staunch Unitarian. He had an eye for the intrinsic, and knew that a man's self-respect is an indispensable possession which to part with is to become poor and abject amid what wealth or splendour of environment soever. It was, indeed, no question of wealth or splendour for him, but the more serious and urgent one of the necessary means of subsistence. The home in Newington Green was exchanged for a cottage in the beautiful village of Mapledurham, near Reading, where, on a bend of the Thames, quite secluded and embowered by trees, stands an old water-mill (a favourite with our landscape painters), which James Gilchrist rented. The little son, Alexander, was then a year old; and here he spent a happy childhood, all unconscious that, amid that tranquil routine of country life, another storm was gathering which was to hasten to a premature close his father's days. Almost as soon as he could walk he became that father's constant companion, the span of years between them bridged by the remarkable gift of sympathetic insight, springing from a great power of loving, which dawned early in the child, grew from day to day, and was hereafter to prove a main