Page:My Life in Two Hemispheres, volume 1.djvu/70

 native town. The Belfast College admitted students to lectures without examination, and I entered the class of Logic and Belles- Lettres in the session of 1841-2. My fellow students were for the most part lively country lads intended for the Presbyterian ministry who made light of logic and belles-lettres. When Professor Cairns was discoursing on the intrinsic relation of things, and expressed his regret that there was no convenient treatise "on relations," one of his audience suggested in a muffled voice, "Japhet in search of a father." Dr. Henry MacCormac was then practising his profession in Belfast and teaching benevolence and good- will with unflagging zeal. I probably made his acquaintance as a patient, but we soon became friends. He introduced me to new regions of thought in metaphysical speculation, and to new views of duty towards the labouring, suffering people which were very welcome. In the double capacity of friend and physician he insisted that I needed relaxation, and took me into society with him for a time, but the experiment was a failure; I was feverish with political designs, and totally indifferent to social success of any sort. The experiment was worth something doubtless, but it was not worth the quantity of my treasured leisure it would consume. At that time I read incessantly, and was making acquaintance from day to day with new regions of thought, an enjoyment beside which other recreations were tame. O'Hagan sent me Carlyle's "Miscellanies," then recently published, and his daring theories moved me like electric shocks. It was O'Hagan who advised me to read in the Edinburgh Review the articles of a young man named Macaulay, who had written brilliantly on some of the great men and great eras of English History. The only poets I had known in boyhood were Moore and Burns. I now read Scott, Byron, Coleridge, and Shelley, and pitied somewhat presumptuously those who wasted their time in salons.

I made few intimacies in Belfast; I had not the disengaged mind and the holiday spirit in which intimacies flourish. The companions of whom I saw most were two young priests Rev. George Crolly, nephew of the Primate, and