Page:Poems of Nature and Life.djvu/214

 2o6 INTRODUCTION

same proud devotee of integrity, the same grand lover of equal justice, the same eagle-eyed hater of shams and frauds and meannesses and cruelties of every kind, that he had always been.

Next, I remembered how he had always shown a certain terror in the consciousness of his own economic helpless- ness ; how he had again and again lamented that his medi- cal profession was to him practically worthless, and that his father had never taught him any occupation by which, in case of reverses, he could earn his own bread by the sweat of his brow ; how nervously and even morbidly anxious he had been at the thought of losing his mother's and sisters' property by some mismanagement of his, as their guardian. I remembered how the fear of bringing them to poverty and of losing what he most prized for himself, indepejidence, had evidently contributed not a little to those political views of the civil war which sometimes took on a pessimistic hue, and had evidently been dark- ened by the political and financial bunghng of the " recon- struction " period. I could well understand how deep dis- trust of himself as a bread-winner and deep distrust of the political, financial, and economical condition of the country, should create in a highly imaginative nature like his a thoroughly morbid dread of coming to beggary, and turn into quite new channels the restless and victorious energies of his powerful mind.

But most of all, perhaps, I saw in Randall's almost feverish throwing of himself into the pursuit of wealth an unconscious drawing of the veil that hid a corrosive pain in the heart. Such a volcanic nature as his always goes to extremes. From deep distress of feeling he was driven to seek relief in that which is the farthest removed from feeling — in a reckless plunge into the world of dry facts

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