ain. The prospects from this position were exceedingly
beautiful. Christ Church was some ten miles distant and the irregular
shores northward outlined by ribbons of breaking waves lay upon the
seaward margin of our vision, while the broken intermediate landscape,
with interrupted agricultural domains and forests was in front of us and
far above us rose the grander peaks of the New Zealand Alps, a constant
charm through the changing atmosphere, now brought near to us through
the optical refraction of the clear air, and again veiled and shadowed
and removed into spectral evanescent forms. The picture was intensely
interesting and like all commanding views where the most expressive
elements of scenery are combined, the remote sea, reflecting every mood
of light and color, and the snowy peaks carrying to us the opaline
glories of rising or setting sun was a comparison that stimulated and
controlled the spectator with its wonderful charm and strength and
poetic changes.

To me whose emotional nature, inherited from a mother gifted with
delicate tastes and a refined enthusiasm for the beautiful had been
curiously discouraged by association with my father's scientific
pursuits, this lively panorama constantly fed my dreams with pleasing
pictures.

My life has been an isolated and repressed one, except for the one
incident I am about to bequeath to posterity. I had not enjoyed the play
of youthful companions except in a fugitive way, I had not gone to
school nor passed three years of muscular and buoyant activity in the
usual pastimes and pleasures of childhood. I had a precocious nature and
it had been unfolded in an atmosphere of strictly intellectual ideas. My
mother had been a constant joy to me during the short years of her life
on earth, but somehow by reason of sickness I had not enjoyed even her
endearment as I might have.

So in my father and his aspirations, and the later hopes of his excited
and passionate longing to regain some trace of my mother, my life from
four years of age was actually and potentially concentrated. My father
cherished me with a great consuming love. He saw in me the
representation in face and partially in temperament of his wife. He
lavished on me every care. Yet because of his eager affection, and his
complete suspense from social connections I was made too largely
dependent on him alone. I lived in his companionship only. My
conversation became prematurely advanced in terms and principles,