ty amused herself with investigating the
causes of these little phenomena, and, before she knew it, got her foot
caught in a cobweb that held her fast, and constrained her, whether she
would or no, to marry a poor man that nobody cared much for but herself.

George was, in truth, one of the sort who evidently have made some
mistake in coming into this world at all, as their internal furniture is
in no way suited to its general courses and currents. He was of the
order of dumb poets,--most wretched when put to the grind of the hard
and actual; for if he who would utter poetry stretches out his hand to a
gainsaying world, he is worse off still who is possessed with the desire
of living it. Especially is this the case, if he be born poor, and with
a dire necessity upon him of making immediate efforts in the hard and
actual. George had a helpless invalid mother to support; so, though he
loved reading and silent thought above all things, he put to instant use
the only convertible worldly talent he possessed, which was a mechanical
genius, and shipped at sixteen as a ship-carpenter. He studied
navigation in the forecastle, and found in its calm diagrams and
tranquil eternal signs food for his thoughtful nature, and a refuge from
the brutality and coarseness of sea-life. He had a healthful, kindly
animal nature, and so his inwardness did not ferment and turn to Byronic
sourness and bitterness; nor did he needlessly parade to everybody in
his vicinity the great gulf which lay between him and them. He was
called a good fellow,--only a little lumpish,--and as he was brave and
faithful, he rose in time to be a shipmaster. But when came the business
of making money, the aptitude for accumulating, George found himself
distanced by many a one with not half his general powers.

What shall a man do with a sublime tier of moral faculties, when the
most profitable business out of his port is the slave-trade? So it was
in Newport in those days. George's first voyage was on a slaver, and he
wished himself dead many a time before it was over,--and ever after
would talk like a man beside himself, if the subject was named. He
declared that the gold made in it was distilled from human blood, from
mothers' tears, from the agonies and dying groans of gasping,
suffocating men and women, and that it would scar and blister the soul
of him that touched it; in short, he talked as whole-souled unpractical
fellows are apt to talk about what respectable