My early life was
perhaps a good preparation for the declining half of life; it having
been such a blank that any thereafter would compare favorably with it.
For a long, long while I have been occasionally visited with a singular
dream; and I have an impression that I have dreamed it ever since I have
been in England. It is, that I am still at college,--or, sometimes, even
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." Experiences which leave effects like this must bite
their way into the heart and soul with a fearful energy! This precursive
solitude had tinged his very life-blood, and woven itself into the
secret tissues of his brain. Yet, patiently absorbing it, he wrote late
in life to a friend: "I am disposed to thank God for the gloom and chill
of my early life, in the hope that my share of adversity came then, when
I bore it alone." It was under such a guise that the test of his genius
and character came to him. Every great mind meets once in life with a
huge opposition that must somehow be made to succumb, before its own
energies can know their full strength, gain a settled footing, and make
a roadway to move forward upon.
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