partly open door.*

* Another anecdote, of a very different kind, belongs to an
earlier period, and to that category of pure naughtiness
which could not fail to be sometimes represented in the
conduct of so gifted a child. An old lady who visited his
mother, and was characterized in the family as 'Aunt Betsy',
had irritated him by pronouncing the word 'lovers' with the
contemptuous jerk which the typical old maid is sometimes
apt to impart to it, when once the question had arisen why a
certain 'Lovers' Walk' was so called. He was too nearly a
baby to imagine what a 'lover' was; he supposed the name
denoted a trade or occupation. But his human sympathy
resented Aunt Betsy's manner as an affront; and he
determined, after probably repeated provocation, to show her
something worse than a 'lover', whatever this might be. So
one night he slipped out of bed, exchanged his nightgown for
what he considered the appropriate undress of a devil,
completed this by a paper tail, and the ugliest face he
could make, and rushed into the drawing-room, where the old
lady and his mother were drinking tea. He was snatched up
and carried away before he had had time to judge the effect
of his apparition; but he did not think, looking back upon
the circumstances in later life, that Aunt Betsy had
deserved quite so ill of her fellow-creatures as he then
believed.

His imaginative emotions were largely absorbed by religion. The early
Biblical training had had its effect, and he was, to use his own words,
'passionately religious' in those nursery years; but during them and
many succeeding ones, his mother filled his heart. He loved her so much,
he has been heard to say, that even as a grown man he could not sit
by her otherwise than with an arm round her waist. It is difficult to
measure the influence which this feeling may have exercised on his later
life; it led, even now, to a strange and touching little incident
which had in it the incipient poet no less than the loving child. His
attendance at Miss Ready's school only kept him from home from Monday
till Saturday of every week; but when called upon to confront his first
five days of banishment he felt sure that he would not survive them. A
leaden cistern belonging to the school had in, or outside it, the raised
image of a face. He chose the cistern for his place of buri