hat his divided life was somewhat like Charles Lamb's, and there were
times when, as he had expressed to Fulkerson, he believed that its
division was favorable to the freshness of his interest in literature.
It certainly kept it a high privilege, a sacred refuge. Now and then he
wrote something, and got it printed after long delays, and when they
met on the St. Lawrence Fulkerson had some of March's verses in his
pocket-book, which he had cut out of astray newspaper and carried
about for years, because they pleased his fancy so much; they formed an
immediate bond of union between the men when their authorship was
traced and owned, and this gave a pretty color of romance to their
acquaintance. But, for the most part, March was satisfied to read. He
was proud of reading critically, and he kept in the current of literary
interests and controversies. It all seemed to him, and to his wife at
second-hand, very meritorious; he could not help contrasting his life
and its inner elegance with that of other men who had no such resources.
He thought that he was not arrogant about it, because he did full
justice to the good qualities of those other people; he congratulated
himself upon the democratic instincts which enabled him to do this; and
neither he nor his wife supposed that they were selfish persons. On the
contrary, they were very sympathetic; there was no good cause that
they did not wish well; they had a generous scorn of all kinds of
narrow-heartedness; if it had ever come into their way to sacrifice
themselves for others, they thought they would have done so, but they
never asked why it had not come in their way. They were very gentle and
kind, even when most elusive; and they taught their children to loathe
all manner of social cruelty. March was of so watchful a conscience in
some respects that he denied himself the pensive pleasure of lapsing
into the melancholy of unfulfilled aspirations; but he did not see that,
if he had abandoned them, it had been for what he held dearer; generally
he felt as if he had turned from them with a high, altruistic aim. The
practical expression of his life was that it was enough to provide well
for his family; to have cultivated tastes, and to gratify them to
the extent of his means; to be rather distinguished, even in the
simplification of his desires. He believed, and his wife believed, that
if the time ever came when he really wished to make a sacrifice to the
fulfilment of the aspirat