to his Great Work, but walked much alone, or accompanied only by the
duck, and without even a book in his hand. But by degrees the scholarly
habits returned to him; my mother mended his pens, and the work went on.

For my part, left much to myself, especially in the mornings, I began to
muse restlessly over the future. Ungrateful. that I was, the happiness
of home ceased to content me. I heard afar the roar of the great world,
and roved impatient by the shore.

At length, one evening, my father, with some modest hums and ha's, and
an unaffected blush on his fair forehead, gratified a prayer frequently
urged on him, and read me some portions of the Great Work. I cannot
express the feelings this lecture created,--they were something akin to
awe. For the design of this book was so immense, and towards its
execution a learning so vast and various had administered, that it
seemed to me as if a spirit had opened to me a new world, which had
always been before my feet, but which my own human blindness had
hitherto concealed from me. The unspeakable patience with which all
these materials had been collected, year after year; the ease with which
now, by the calm power of genius, they seemed of themselves to fall into
harmony and system; the unconscious humility with which the scholar
exposed the stores of a laborious life,---all combined to rebuke my own
restlessness and ambition, while they filled me with a pride in my
father which saved my wounded egotism from a pang. Here, indeed, was
one of those books which embrace an existence; like the Dictionary of
Bayle, or the History of Gibbon, or the "Fasti Hellenici" of Clinton, it
was a book to which thousands of books had contributed, only to make the
originality of the single mind more bold and clear. Into the furnace
all vessels of gold, of all ages, had been cast; but from the mould came
the new coin, with its single stamp. And, happily, the subject of the