xpression at the same time tender
and severe, chaste and impassioned.

'This expression revealed the depths of his being. Nothing
could be purer, more exalted than his thoughts; nothing more
tenacious, more exclusive, more intensely devoted, than his
affections.... But he could only understand that which closely
resembled himself.... Everything else only existed for him as a
kind of annoying dream which he tried to shake off while living
with the rest of the world. Always plunged in reveries,
realities displeased him. As a child, he could never touch a
sharp instrument without injuring himself with it; as a man, he
never found himself face to face with a being different from
himself without being wounded by the living contradiction....

'He was preserved from a constant antagonism by a voluntary and
almost inveterate habit of never seeing or hearing anything
which was disagreeable to him, unless it touched upon his
personal affections. The beings who did not think as he did,
were only phantoms in his eyes. As his manners were polished
and graceful, it was easy to mistake his cold disdain or
insurmountable aversion for benevolent courtesy....

'He never spent an hour in open-hearted expansiveness, without
compensating for it by a season of reserve. The moral causes
which induced such reserve were too slight, too subtle, to be
discovered by the naked eye. It was necessary to use the
microscope to read his soul, into which so little of the light
of the living ever penetrated....

'With such a character, it seems strange he should have had
friends: yet he had them, not only the friends of his mother,
who esteemed him as the noble son of a noble mother, but
friends of his own age, who loved him ardently, and who were
loved by him in return.... He had formed a high ideal of
friendship; in the age of early illusions he loved to think
that his friends and himself, brought up nearly in the same
manner, with the same principles, would never change their
opinions, and that no formal disagreement could ever occur
between them....

'He was externally so affectionate, his education had been so
finished, and he possessed so much natural grace, that he had
the gift of pleasing even where he was not personally known.
His exceeding lovelin