many an hour in daydreams, in which I stood before Roman judges,
before Dominican Inquisitors, was flung to lions, tortured on the
rack, burned at the stake; one day I saw myself preaching some great
new faith to a vast crowd of people, and they listened and were
converted, and I became a great religious leader. But always, with a
shock, I was brought back to earth, where there were no heroic deeds
to do, no lions to face, no judges to defy, but only some dull duty to
be performed. And I used to fret that I was born so late, when all the
grand things had been done, and when there was no chance of preaching
and suffering for a new religion.

From the age of eight my education accented the religious side of my
character. Under Miss Marryat's training my religious feeling received
a strongly Evangelical bent, but it was a subject of some distress to
me that I could never look back to an hour of "conversion"; when
others gave their experiences, and spoke of the sudden change they had
felt, I used to be sadly conscious that no such change had occurred in
me, and I felt that my dreamy longings were very poor things compared
with the vigorous "sense of sin" spoken of by the preachers, and used
dolefully to wonder if I were "saved." Then I had an uneasy sense that
I was often praised for my piety when emulation and vanity were more
to the front than religion; as when I learned by heart the Epistle of
James, far more to distinguish myself for my good memory than from any
love of the text itself; the sonorous cadences of many parts of the
Old and New Testaments pleased my ear, and I took a dreamy pleasure in
repeating them aloud, just as I would recite for my own amusement
hundreds of lines of Milton's "Paradise Lost," as I sat swinging on
some branch of a tree, lying back often on some swaying bough and
gazing into the unfathomable blue of the sky, till I lost myself in an
ecstasy of sound and colour, half chanting the melodious sentences and