eir
contemporaries, simply because these two eminent men allowed
consciousness of their own weakness to 'sickly over' the spontaneous
impulses of their strength.

The wonder is that the reaction against such an education as that
through which James Mill brought his son,--an education so intense, so
purely analytical, doing so much for the reason and so little for the
satisfaction of the affections,--was not of the most violent kind. The
wonder is that the crisis through which nearly every youth of good
quality has to pass, and from which Mr. Mill, as he has told us, by no
means escaped, did not land him in some of the extreme forms of
transcendentalism. If it had done so the record of the journey would no
doubt have been more abundant in melodramatic incidents. It would have
done more to tickle the fancy of 'the present age of loud disputes but
weak convictions.' And it might have been found more touching by the
large numbers of talkers and writers who seem to think that a history of
a careful man's opinions on grave and difficult subjects ought to have
all the rapid movements and unexpected turns of a romance, and that a
book without rapture and effusion and a great many capital letters must
be joyless and disappointing. Those of us who dislike literary hysteria
as much as we dislike the coarseness that mistakes itself for force, may
well be glad to follow the mental history of a man who knew how to move
and grow without any of these reactions and leaps on the one hand, or
any of that overdone realism on the other, which may all make a more
striking picture, but which do assuredly more often than not mark the
ruin of a mind and the nullification of a career.

If we are now and then conscious in the book of a certain want of
spacing, of changing perspectives and long vistas; if we have perhaps a
sense of being too narrowly enclosed; if we miss the relish of humour or
the occasional relief of irony; we ought to remember that we are busy
not with a work of imagination or art, but with the practical record of
the formation of an eminent thinker's mental habits and the succession
of his mental attitudes. The formation of such mental habits is not a
romance, but the most arduous of real concerns. If we are led up to none
of the enkindled summits of the soul, and plunged into none of its
abysses, that is no reason why we should fail to be struck by the pale
flame of strenuous self-possession, or touched by the ingenuousness