in England. It is, that I am still at college, or,
sometimes, even, at school--and there is a sense that I have
been there unconscionably long, and have quite failed to
make such progress as my contemporaries have done; and I
seem to meet some of them with a feeling of shame and
depression that broods over me as I think of it, even when
awake. This dream, recurring all through these twenty or
thirty years, must be one of the effects of that heavy
seclusion in which I shut myself up for twelve years after
leaving college, when everybody moved onward and left me
behind. How strange that it should come now, when I may call
myself famous and prosperous!--when I am happy too."

The allusion here is to a state of solitude which was the young man's
positive choice at the time--or into which he drifted at least under
the pressure of his natural shyness and reserve. He was not expansive,
he was not addicted to experiments and adventures of intercourse, he
was not, personally, in a word, what is called sociable. The general
impression of this silence-loving and shade-seeking side of his
character is doubtless exaggerated, and, in so far as it points to him
as a sombre and sinister figure, is almost ludicrously at fault. He
was silent, diffident, more inclined to hesitate, to watch and wait
and meditate, than to produce himself, and fonder, on almost any
occasion, of being absent than of being present. This quality betrays
itself in all his writings. There is in all of them something cold and
light and thin, something belonging to the imagination alone, which
indicates a man but little disposed to multiply his relations, his
points of contact, with society. If we read the six volumes of
Note-Books with an eye to the evidence of this unsocial side of his
life, we find it in sufficient abundance. But we find at the same time