Among his favorite authors, while at the University, we have been told he greatly delighted in the old dramatists, Webster, Heywood, and Fletcher. The grace and harmony of style and versification which he found particularly in the latter master became one of his favorite themes, and he often dwelt upon this excellence. He loved to repeat the sad old strains of Bion; and Aeschylus and Sophocles interested him deeply.
On leaving Cambridge, he took his degree and went immediately to London to reside with his father. It was a beautiful relation which always existed between the elder and the younger scholar; and now, as soon as Arthur had been entered on the boards of the Inner Temple, the father and son sat down to read law together. Legal studies occupied the young student till the month of October, 1832, when he became an inmate of the office of an eminent conveyancer in Lincoln's Inn Fields. Although he applied himself diligently to obtain a sound practical knowledge of the profession he had chosen, his former habits of literary pursuit did not entirely desert him. During the winter he translated most of the sonnets in the "Vita Nuova," and composed a dramatic sketch with Raffaello for the hero. About this period he wrote brief, but excellent, memoirs of Petrarch, Voltaire, and Burke, for the "Gallery of Portraits," then publishing by the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge. But his time, when unoccupied at the office, was principally devoted to metaphysical research and the history of philosophical opinion. His spirits, sometimes apt to be graver than is the wont of youth, now became more animated and even gay, so that his family were cheered on to hope that his health was firmly gaining ground. The unpleasant symptoms which manifested themselves in his earlier years had almost entirely disappeared, when an attack of intermittent fever in the spring of 1833 gave the fatal blow to his constitution. In August, the careful, tender father took his beloved son into Germany, trusting to a change of climate for restoration. Travelling slowly, they lingered among the scenes connected with a literature and a history both were so familiar with, and many pleasant and profitable hours of delightful converse gladdened Arthur's journey. It is difficult to picture a more interesting group of travellers through the picturesque regions they were again exploring.
No child was ever more ardently loved--nay, worshipped--by his father than Arthur Hallam. The parallel, perhaps, exists in Edmund Burke's fond attachment for and subsequent calamity in the loss of his son Richard. That passage in the life of the great statesman is one of the most affecting in all biographical literature. "The son thus deeply lamented," says Prior, "had always conducted himself with much filial duty and affection. Their confidence on all subjects was even more unreserved than commonly prevails between father and son, and their esteem for each other higher.... The son looked to the father as one of the first, if not the very first, character in history; the father had formed the very highest opinion of the talents of the son, and among his friends rated them superior to his own." The same confiding companionship grew up between Henry Hallam and his eldest boy, and continued till "death set the seal of eternity" upon the young and gifted Arthur.
The travellers were returning to Vienna from Pesth; a damp day set in while they were on the journey; again intermittent fever attacked the sensitive invalid, and suddenly, mysteriously, his life was ended. It was the 15th of September, 1833, and Arthur Hallam lay dead in his father's arms. Twenty-two brief years, and all high hopes for him, the manly, the noble-spirited, this side the tomb, are broken down forever. Well might his heart-crushed father sob aloud, "He seemed to tread the earth as a spirit from some better world." The author of "Horae Subsecivae" aptly quotes Shakspeare's memorable words, in connection with the tragic bereavement of that autumnal day in Vienna:--
"The idea of thy life shall sweetly creep
Into my study of imagination;
And every lovely organ of thy life
Shall come apparelled in more precious habit,
More moving delicate, and full of life,
Into the eye and prospect of my soul,
Than when thou liv'dst indeed."
Standing by the grave of this young person, now made so renowned by the genius of a great poet, whose song has embalmed his name and called the world's attention to his death, the inevitable reflection is not of sorrow. He sleeps well who is thus lamented, and "nothing can touch him further."
THE CONFESSIONS OF A MEDIUM.
It is not yet a year since I ceased to act as a Spiritual Medium. (I am forced to make use of this title as the most intelligible, but I do it with a strong mental protest.) At first, I desired only to withdraw myself quietly from the peculiar associations into which I had been thrown by the exercise of my faculty, and be content with the simple fact of my escape. A man who joins the Dashaways does not care to have the circumstance announced in the newspapers. "So, he was an habitual drunkard," the public would say. I was overcome by a similar reluctance,--nay, I might honestly call it shame,--since, although I had at intervals officiated as a Medium for a period of seven years, my name had been mentioned, incidentally, only once or twice in the papers devoted especially to Spiritualism. I had no such reputation as that of Hume or Andrew Jackson Davis, which would call for a public statement of my recantation. The result would be, therefore, to give prominence to a weakness, which, however manfully overcome, might be remembered to my future prejudice.
I find, however, that the resolution to be silent leaves me restless and unsatisfied. And in reflecting calmly--objectively, for the first time--upon the experience of those seven years, I recognize so many points wherein my case is undoubtedly analogous to that of hundreds of others who may be still entangled in the same labyrinth whence I have but recently escaped, so clear a solution of much that is enigmatical, even to those who reject Spiritualism, that the impulse to write weighs upon me with the pressure of a neglected duty. I cannot longer be silent, and, in the conviction that the truth of my statement will be evident enough to those most concerned in hearing it, without the authority of any name, (least of all, of one so little known as mine,) I now give my confession to the world. The names of the individuals whom I shall have occasion to introduce are, of course, disguised; but, with this exception, the narrative is the plainest possible record of my own experience. Many of the incidents winch I shall be obliged to describe are known only to the actors therein, who, I feel assured, will never foolishly betray themselves. I have therefore no fear that any harm can result from my disclosures.
In order to make my views intelligible to those readers who have paid no attention to psychological subjects, I must commence a little in advance of my story. My own individual nature is one of those apparently inconsistent combinations which are frequently found in the children of parents whose temperaments and mental personalities widely differ. This class of natures is much larger than would be supposed. Inheriting opposite, even conflicting, traits from father and mother, they assume, as either element predominates, diverse characters; and that which is the result of temperament (in fact, congenital inconsistency) is set down by the unthinking world as moral weakness or duplicity. Those who have sufficient skill to perceive and reconcile--or, at least, govern--the opposing elements are few, indeed. Had the power come to me sooner, I should have been spared the necessity of making these confessions.