it so, laid occasionally upon him self-imposed
burdens greater than might be borne by any one with safety. In that
direction there was in him, at such times, something even hard and
aggressive; in his determinations a something that had almost the tone
of fierceness; something in his nature that made his resolves
insuperable, however hasty the opinions on which they had been formed.
So rare were these manifestations, however, and so little did they
prejudice a character as entirely open and generous as it was at all
times ardent and impetuous, that only very infrequently, towards the
close of the middle term of a friendship which lasted without the
interruption of a day for more than three-and-thirty years, were they
ever unfavorably presented to me. But there they were; and when I have
seen strangely present, at such chance intervals, a stern and even cold
isolation of self-reliance side by side with a susceptivity almost
feminine and the most eager craving for sympathy, it has seemed to me as
though his habitual impulses for everything kind and gentle had sunk,
for the time, under a sudden hard and inexorable sense of what fate had
dealt to him in those early years. On more than one occasion, indeed, I
had confirmation of this. "I must entreat you," he wrote to me in June,
1862, "to pause for an instant, and go back to what you know of my
childish days, and to ask yourself whether it is natural that something
of the character formed in me then, and lost under happier
circumstances, should have reappeared in the last five years. The
never-to-be-forgotten misery of that old time bred a certain shrinking
sensitiveness in a certain ill-clad ill-fed child, that I have found
come back in the never-to-be-forgotten misery of this later time."

One good there was, however, altogether without drawback, and which
claims simply to be mentioned before my narrative is resumed. The story
of his childish misery has itself sufficiently shown that he never
throughout it lost his precious gift of animal spirits, or his native
capacity for humorous enjoyment; and there were positive gains to him
from what he underwent, which were also rich and lasting. To what in the
outset of his difficulties and trials gave the decisive bent to his
genius, I have already made special reference; and we are to observe,
of what followed, that with the very poor and unprosperous, out of whose
sufferings and strugglings, and the virtues as well as vices born