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."

Under another picture, he describes this same state in the preface to
"The Snow Image," dedicated to Bridge:--

"I sat down by the wayside of life, like a man under enchantment, and a
shrubbery sprung up around me, and the bushes grew to be saplings, and
the saplings became trees, until no exit appeared possible, through the
entangling depths of my obscurity. And there, perhaps, I should be
sitting at this moment, with the moss on the imprisoning tree-trunks,
and the yellow leaves of more than a score of autumns piled above me, if
it had not been for you. For it was through your interposition--and
that, moreover, unknown to himself--that your early friend was brought
before the public, somewhat more prominently than heretofore, in the
first volume of 'Twice-Told Tales.'"

Bridge had been, in fact, his only confidant from boyish days. To him he
showed the misery of "hope deferred" that then was in his heart, and to
him allowed himself to speak in words that went beyond his steady sense
of the situation, though representing moments of low courage. "I'm a
doomed man," he wrote to him, "and over I must go."

It was under the impulse of the sight of this deep discouragement in