Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II. CLOUDS. The boy's letter to his sister brings him before us in his fifteenth year, the year which proved to be the last of his boyhood. He comes before us again in the first of his published writings, six years later. The intervening period gave the decisive stamp to his life. We see in him at the beginning a refined and sensitive nature, its affections developed and satisfied in the warm atmosphere of home, and its intellect already stimulated by Scotch theology and metaphysics. It was a nature that early showed its essential bias, an attraction toward truth, beauty, and love. Then came the rough transplanting into an attorney's office. The study and the work were dull and uncongenial; the knowledge acquired was dry and 11 iinutritious ; for the present, there was no recompense in the sense of service rendered to others, or even the satisfaction of earning a daily wage; and as preparation for the future, the way led to a profession which was hopelessly unsuited to the man. The result of an outward situation so repellant was to throw the young man back upon that purely interior life, of fancy, feeling, and speculation, to which by innate constitution he was prone enough without external incitement. Among the men of his time, Arthur Clough is the one with whom it is most natural to compare him. The two were alike in their thirst for truth and their purity of life, and they swam in the same sea of thought. But Clough was happy in the circumstance that his early years were passed at Rugby and at Oxford ; where along with his Latin and Greek hegot the hardy training of the foot-ball ground and the river, the grand influence of Dr. Arnold, and that companionship with fresh youthful spirits which he so charmingly portrays in the " Bothie." For him, the unsparing quest ...