Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 133.djvu/799

Rh  of our moods and desires, as we abandon ourselves to the natural alternation of cloud and sunshine, day and night, is that we are not disinterested and free: our appetites and theories chain us to a treadmill which we must go on mounting as long as we can, because we know that we shall lose our footing, and be crushed at last. Such unity as our lives attain is due to the pursuit of a purpose, the carrying out of a doctrine in season and out of season: the unity of a life like Mr. Procter's, serene and beautiful even on "the woeful threshold of age," where he had to linger so long, is due to the spontaneous nobility of mind which never forgot its innate generosity, delicacy, and uprightness, in converse with nature as with men, with books and the world, but gave their due to all.

He came of a good stock, of a family of farmers which had held their own in Yorkshire or Cumberland—he never knew which—for three hundred years or more without producing anybody distinguished, and rather ashamed than otherwise of the one period when their line was crossed by a strain of indisputable gentry. His father was one of several children—"the best among the males." Perhaps this was the reason why he came up to London to seek his fortune; he found it rather than made it, and when he had found it he "subsided into a private station where he lived unoccupied and independent for many years. He possessed," his son says, "the most uncompromising honesty I ever met with. My mother was simply the kindest and tenderest mother in the world."

In his autobiography, which does not go beyond his twentieth year, he dwells with predilection on everything that can be made to show himself in a commonplace light He was really a singular and precocious child, with a touch of something out of the common in his quality from the first, and yet neither then nor afterwards was his mental stature much above the common. At five he knew nothing beyond his letters, or a little easy reading acquired mainly from a Bible full of pictures; but for a year past he had, as we learn on the authority of his mother, preferred books to everything, and could hardly be got to leave them for his meals. His senses, he says, were attracted by the scent of the violet, the April grass, and the flowers; he heard noises in the winds and the running river; otherwise he marched quietly onwards in the great crowds of human life with his undiscovered destiny before him. The sign of that destiny showed itself in the childish love, whose story is told in the beautiful essay on the death of friends. In the height of his passion he was sent to school; he tells us little of himself or of what he learnt there, but much of a charming, kindhearted emigré, M. Molière, who was one of the masters, who was fond of mignonette and myrtle, and denied himself even these pleasures for the sake of charity. At thirteen he went to Harrow, where he was the contemporary of Peel and Byron, and he once promised to pay Peel half a crown to do an imposition for him. He did not admire the studies of the place; and the levelling character of public school discipline told upon him to the full. "The daily task, the daily meal, the regular hours of sleep and exercise, or idleness, were all sufficient in themselves for me. I had nothing of that feverish unwholesome temperament which opens the scholar into worlds beyond his reach, and which is sometimes called genius; not much even of that vigorous ambition which tempts him into the accessible region just above him; yet I was not without daring." In fact he was rather celebrated for his boxing, and liked in after years to recollect that he had beaten boys bigger than himself.

It was in the vacations in the country, which he spent mostly at the house of his mother's uncle, that his individuality nourished itself: he fancied that a raven haunted him; some things which were beautiful, and many things which were terrible, operated very sensibly upon him; he began to dream and to recollect his dreams, and strove to discover their meaning and origin. A healthier influence was that of a servant, the daughter of a man who had failed in a profession or business. She knew Richardson and Fielding well, and told him stories out of them, and taught him to worship Shakespeare, whose works he bought with the first money he got, and entered into a world beyond his own: it is characteristic that he did not attempt to carry on his Shakespearian studies at Harrow. He left there at eighteen, and was articled to Mr. Atherton, a solicitor at Calne, where he spent two of the most fruitful years of his life. He learned to think and feel, and there was nothing to interrupt him: he was attached to Mr. Atherton, but not to his profession, which only influenced him by setting him to brood on all the difficulties and intricacies of life. In his autobiography he makes light of the doubts and change of opinion which at the time he dignified with the name of speculations, and it is, perhaps, to be wished, that people whose 