A Writer's Recollections — Volume 1 by Mrs. Humphry Ward
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page 5 of 169 (02%)
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in the words "sensuous" and "passionate," which he applies to poetry in
the _Areopagitica_. And the same thing applies to autobiography, where selection is even more necessary than in fiction. Nothing ought to be told, I think, that does not interest or kindle one's own mind in looking back; it is the only condition on which one can hope to interest or kindle other minds. And this means that one ought to handle things broadly, taking only the salient points in the landscape of the past, and of course with as much detachment as possible. Though probably in the end one will have to admit--egotists that we all are!--that not much detachment _is_ possible. For me, the first point that stands out is the arrival of a little girl of five, in the year 1856, at a gray-stone house in a Westmorland valley, where, fourteen years earlier, the children of Arnold of Rugby, the "Doctor" of _Tom Brown's Schooldays_, had waited on a June day, to greet their father, expected from the South, only to hear, as the summer day died away, that two hours' sharp illness, that very morning, had taken him from them. Of what preceded my arrival as a black-haired, dark-eyed child, with my father, mother, and two brothers, at Fox How, the holiday house among the mountains which the famous headmaster had built for himself in 1834, I have but little recollection. I see dimly another house in wide fields, where dwarf lilies grew, and I know that it was a house in Tasmania, where at the time of my birth my father, Thomas Arnold, the Doctor's second son, was organizing education in the young colony. I can just recall, too, the deck of a ship which to my childish feet seemed vast--but the _William Brown_ was a sailing-ship of only 400 tons!--in which we made the voyage home in 1856. Three months and a half we took about it, going round the Horn in bitter weather, much run over by rats at night, and expected to take our baths by day in two huge barrels full of sea water on the deck, into which we children |
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