METHING of the other side of the medal has now to be presented. His
letters enable us to see him amid his troubles and difficulties of
writing, as faithfully as in his leisure and enjoyments; and when, to
the picture thus given of Dickens's home life in Switzerland, some
account has been added of the vicissitudes of literary labour undergone
in the interval, as complete a representation of the man will be
afforded as could be taken from any period of his career. Of the larger
life whereof it is part, the Lausanne life is indeed a perfect
microcosm, wanting only the London streets. This was his chief present
want, as will shortly be perceived: but as yet the reader does not feel
it, and he sees otherwise in all respects at his best the great observer
and humourist; interested in everything that commended itself to a
thoroughly earnest and eagerly enquiring nature; popular beyond measure
with all having intercourse with him; the centre, and very soul, of
social enjoyment; letting nothing escape a vision that was not more keen
than kindly; and even when apparently most idle, never idle in the sense
of his art, but adding day by day to experiences that widened its range,
and gave freer and healthier play to an imagination always busily at
work, alert and active in a singular degree, and that seemed to be quite
untiring. At his heart there was a genuine love of nature at all times;
and strange as it may seem to connect this with such forms of humorous
delineation as are most identified with his genius, it is yet the
literal truth that the impressions of this noble Swiss scenery were with
him during the work of many subsequent years: a present and actual,
though it might be seldom a directly conscious, influence. When he said
afterwards, that, while writing the book on which he is now engaged, he
had not seen less clearly each step of the wooden midshipman's
staircase, each pew of the church in which Florence was married, or each
bed in the dormitory of Doctor Blimber's establishment, because he was
himself at the time by the lake of Geneva, he might as truly have said
that he saw them all the more clearly even because of that circumstance.
He worked his humour to its greatest results by the freedom and force of
his imagination; and while the smallest or commonest objects around him
were food for the one, the other might have pined or perished without
additional higher aliment. Dickens had little love for Wordsworth, but
he was