had shown this disposition strongly,--being often known, as I have
already mentioned, to withdraw himself from his playmates, and sitting
alone upon a tomb in the churchyard, give himself up, for hours, to
thought. As his mind began to disclose its resources, this feeling grew
upon him; and, had his foreign travel done no more than, by detaching
him from the distractions of society, to enable him, solitarily and
freely, to commune with his own spirit, it would have been an
all-important step gained towards the full expansion of his faculties.
It was only then, indeed, that he began to feel himself capable of the
abstraction which self-study requires, or to enjoy that freedom from the
intrusion of others' thoughts, which alone leaves the contemplative mind
master of its own. In the solitude of his nights at sea, in his lone
wanderings through Greece, he had sufficient leisure and seclusion to
look within himself, and there catch the first "glimpses of his glorious
mind." One of his chief delights, as he mentioned in his "Memoranda,"
was, when bathing in some retired spot, to seat himself on a high rock
above the sea, and there remain for hours, gazing upon the sky and the
waters[1], and lost in that sort of vague reverie, which, however
formless and indistinct at the moment, settled afterwards on his pages,
into those clear, bright pictures which will endure for ever.

Were it not for the doubt and diffidence that hang round the first steps
of genius, this growing consciousness of his own power, these openings
into a new domain of intellect, where he was to reign supreme, must have
made the solitary hours of the young traveller one dream of happiness.
But it will be seen that, even yet, he distrusted his own strength, nor
was at all aware of the height to which the spirit he was now calling up
would grow. So enamoured, nevertheless, had he become of these lonely
musings, that even the society of his fellow-traveller, though with
pursuits so congenial to his own, grew at last to be a chain and a