--the
heroic and the humorous--of the keenest and most dissecting views of
real life, with the grandest and most spiritualised conceptions of ideal
grandeur.

To the same period, perhaps, another predominant characteristic of his
maturer mind and writings may be traced. In this anticipated experience
of the world which his early mixture with its crowd gave him, it is but
little probable that many of the more favourable specimens of human
kind should have fallen under his notice. On the contrary, it is but too
likely that some of the lightest and least estimable of both sexes may
have been among the models, on which, at an age when impressions sink
deepest, his earliest judgments of human nature were formed. Hence,
probably, those contemptuous and debasing views of humanity with which
he was so often led to alloy his noblest tributes to the loveliness and
majesty of general nature. Hence the contrast that appeared between the
fruits of his imagination and of his experience,--between those dreams,
full of beauty and kindliness, with which the one teemed at his bidding,
and the dark, desolating bitterness that overflowed when he drew from
the other.

Unpromising, however, as was his youth of the high destiny that awaited
him, there was one unfailing characteristic of the imaginative order of
minds--his love of solitude--which very early gave signs of those habits
of self-study and introspection by which alone the "diamond quarries" of
genius are worked and brought to light. When but a boy, at Harrow, he
had shown this disposition strongly,--being often known, as I have
already mentioned, to withdraw himself from his playmates, and sitting
alone upon a tomb in the churchyard, give himself up, for hours, to
thought. As his mind began to disclose its resources, this feeling grew
upon him; and, had his foreign travel done no more than, by detaching
him from the distractions of society, to enable him, solitarily and
freely, to commune with his own spirit, it would have been an
all-important step gained towards the full expansion of his faculties.
It was only then, indeed, that he began to feel himself capable of the
abstraction which self-study requires, or to enjoy that freedom from the
intrusion of others' thoughts, which alone leaves the contemplative mind
master of its own. In the solitude of his nights at sea, in his lone
wanderings through Greece, he had sufficient leisure and seclusion to
look within himself, and there