wearisome distress; and certainly shut him out from the sympathy and
appreciation which, if all the conditions had been different, might have
been given him by sincere and competent admirers. So little known among
his own townsfolk, it is not to be wondered at that no encouraging
answer reached him from more distant communities.

In his own home there was the faith which only love can give, but
outside of it a chill drove his hopes and ardors back upon himself and
turned them into despairs. His relatives, having seen him educated by
the aid of his uncle, and now arrived at maturity, expected him to take
his share in practical affairs. But the very means adopted to train him
for a career had settled his choice of one in a direction perhaps not
wholly expected; all cares and gains of ordinary traffic seemed sordid
and alien to him. Yet a young man just beginning his career, with no
solid proof of his own ability acquired, cannot but be sensitive to
criticism from those who have gained a right to comment by their own
special successes. As he watched these slow and dreary years pass by,
from his graduation in 1825 to the time when he first came fully before
the public in 1837, he must often have been dragged down by terrible
fears that perhaps the fairest period of life was being wasted, losing
forever the chance of fruition. "I sat down by the wayside of life," he
wrote, long after, "like a man under enchantment, and a shrubbery sprang
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." Judge in what a silence and solitary
self-communing the time must have passed, to leave a thought like this:
"To think, as the sun goes down, what events have happened in the course
of the day,--events of ordinary occurrence; as, the clocks have struck,
the dead have been buried." Or this: "A recluse like myself, or a
prisoner, to measure time by the progress of sunshine through his