those subjects which train,
even coerce, the thinking powers, and which were doubly requisite for
a nature in which the creative imagination was predominant over all the
other mental faculties, great as these other faculties were. And, even
as poet, he suffered from this omission: since the involutions and
overlappings of thought and phrase, which occur in his earlier and again
in his latest works, must have been partly due to his never learning to
follow the processes of more normally constituted minds. It would be
a great error to suppose that they ever arose from the absence of a
meaning clearly felt, if not always clearly thought out, by himself. He
was storing his memory and enriching his mind; but precisely in so
doing he was nourishing the consciousness of a very vivid and urgent
personality; and, under the restrictions inseparable from the life of a
home-bred youth, it was becoming a burden to him. What outlet he found
in verse we do not know, because nothing survives of what he may then
have written. It is possible that the fate of his early poems, and,
still more, the change of ideals, retarded the definite impulse towards
poetic production. It would be a relief to him to sketch out and
elaborate the plan of his future work--his great mental portrait gallery
of typical men and women; and he was doing so during at least the later
years which preceded the birth of 'Pauline'. But even this must have
been the result of some protracted travail with himself; because it was
only the inward sense of very varied possibilities of existence which
could have impelled him towards this kind of creation. No character he
ever produced was merely a figment of the brain.

It was natural, therefore, that during this time of growth he should
have been, not only more restless, but less amiable than at any other.
The always impatient temper assumed a quality of aggressiveness. He
behaved as a youth will who knows himself to be clever, and believes
that he is not appreciated, because the crude or paradoxical forms which
his cleverness assumes do not recommend it to his elders' minds. He
set the judgments of those about him at defiance, and gratuitously
proclaimed himself everything that he was, and some things that he was
not. All this subdued itself as time advanced, and the coming man in him
could throw off the wayward child. It was all so natural that it might
well be forgotten. But it distressed his mother, the one being in the