"Men granted that his speech was wise,
But, when a glance they caught
Of his slim grace and woman's eyes,
They laughed and called him good-for-naught."
There was a gracious indolence in him, an imperturbable serenity, which made proclamation in advance of a truce to all forms of brute collision. No doubt if they had hunted him out for a victim of the political animosity which led to so many tragedies in the early days of our anti-slavery agitation, he would have stood up to the stake as gayly as one of the martyrs of old; but the man's nature was repugnant to discords, and shrank from combats ruder than those of the printing-press.
All through his career, the religion of humanity is put forward with point and persistence, and the finest of distinctions in morality are maintained,—the so constantly ignored vital difference between the deed and its motive, as in "Sir Launfal:"—
"The Holy Supper is kept, indeed,
In whatso we share with another's need;
Not what we give, but what we share,—
For the gift without the giver is bare;
Who gives himself with his alms feeds three,—
Himself, his hungering neighbor, and Me;"
so that one might have expected from him the life of a social reformer, so keenly did he feel the outrages of civilization. But, possibly from the fact that in those days human slavery in our country summed up all villainies and crimes, and in the war against that he threw all his surplus energy, he never took part in the crusade then beginning against the more familiar iniquities nearer home. But in his constitution there was, I think, another reason why the author of "Sir Launfal," "Hunger and Cold," "The Landlord," and "The Search" should not have emulated Howard or Miss Fry, and have gone into the realms of destitution to relieve its wrongs. He was extremely fastidious, and anything that offended his taste by vulgarity or crudeness repelled him with such force that the work of practical philanthropy would have been impossible to his temperament. The indolence I have above spoken of—which must not be confounded with slothfulness, but is, as the true meaning of the word indicates, the following of the dictates of the temperament, whether in activity or rest—led him to contemplation rather than action.
The refined idealism of his nature, made more subtle by the indulgence of an idolizing circle of relatives and friends, who saw in him the promise of more even than he ever attained, or than was possible to the smooth prosperity of his life, made it impossible for him to thrust himself into the social conflicts, whether of poverty or of politics, though the finest and most exalted passages of his work were not so fine and exalted as his personality; he was better than anything he ever wrote, and this is understood by all who knew him, and that what he wrote was only the overflow of a mind which never needed a stimulus to divine cogitation. The fascination, the subtle personal glamour he unconsciously threw over those who came in true contact with him, made them always expect more than he accomplished, for in that there was not even the stimulus of ambition. What he did was done with the spontaneousness of the wind or the sunshine. If he had a vanity, it was to be in all points accoutred for his place in society; but even this was so lightly held that few knew him well enough to see it, and it was never a motive power in him.
Knowing all his earlier work before I knew him, I thought I detected a want of that profounder sympathy with humanity and the pathos of life which comes from actual suffering, and I remember saying to one of his admirers, before I saw him, that what he wanted to make him a great poet was suffering. This he had gained somewhat of when I made his acquaintance. His wife had died not long before I went to Cambridge to see him and to enlist his assistance in "The Crayon," and he was in the earliest phase of the reaction from a sorrow which had made him insist on solitude. All his surroundings had kept up the impressions of his bereavement, and all his associates sympathized with and respected it, and I came in with a new life just as he came to need relief from the depression which had become morbid. He has told it in one of his first letters to me:—
"I am glad you had a pleasant time here. I had, and you made me fifteen years younger while you stayed. When a man gets to my age, enthusiasms don't often knock at the door of his garret. I am all the more charmed with them when they come. A youth full of such pure intensity of hope and faith and purpose, what is he but the breath of a resurrection trumpet to us stiffened old fellows, bidding us up out of our clay and earth if we would not be too late?
"Your inspiration is still to you a living mistress; make her immortal in her promptings and her consolations by imaging her truly in art. Mine looks at me with eyes of paler flame, and beckons across a gulf. You came into my loneliness like an incarnate inspiration. And it is dreary enough sometimes; for a mountain peak on whose snow your foot makes the first mortal print is not so lonely as a room full of happy faces from which one is missing forever."
The tone of his life at that period is given in the few poems of the time, published later: the "Ode to Happiness," which he read to me unfinished during that first visit; "The Wind-Harp," in which