direction were freely confessed. From my father, whose studious habits
in life had made him not only eminent at the bar but profoundly
conversant with general literature, he had inherited a taste for
reading, and it was this omnivorous passion for books that led my
brother to say that his education had only begun when he fancied that it
had left off. In boyhood he contracted that fascinating but highly
injurious habit of reading in bed, which he subsequently extolled with
great fervor; and as he grew older the habit increased upon him until
he was obliged to admit that he could not enjoy literature unless he
took it horizontally. If a friend expostulated with him, advising him to
give up tobacco, reading in bed, and late hours, he said: "And what have
we left in life if we give up all our bad habits?"

That the poetic instinct was always strong within him there has never
been room to question, but, perhaps, for the reasons before assigned, it
was tardy in making its way outward. For years his mind lay fallow and
receptive, awaiting the occasion which should develop the true
inspiration of the poet. He was accustomed to speak of himself, and too
modestly, as merely a versifier, but his own experience should have
contradicted this estimate, for his first efforts at verse were
singularly halting in mechanical construction, and he was well past his
twenty-fifth year before he gave to the world any verse worthy the name.
What might be called the "curse of comedy" was on him, and it was not
until he threw off that yoke and gave expression to the better and the
sweeter thoughts within him that, as with Bion, "the voice of song
flowed freely from the heart." It seems strange that a man who became a
master of the art of mechanism in verse should have been deficient in
this particular at a period comparatively late, but it merely
illustrates the theory of gradual development and marks the phases of
life through which, with his character of many sides, he was compelled