himself an example of the truth the great poet never tired of
enforcing, that Nature has subtle helps for all who are admitted to
become free of her wonders and mysteries.

Another noticeable thing in him is impressed upon these letters, as upon
many also heretofore quoted, for indeed all of them are marvellously
exact in the reproduction of his nature. He did not think lightly of his
work; and the work that occupied him at the time was for the time
paramount with him. But the sense he entertained, whether right or
wrong, of the importance of what he had to do, of the degree to which it
concerned others that the power he held should be exercised
successfully, and of the estimate he was justified in forming as the
fair measure of its worth or greatness, does not carry with it of
necessity presumption or self-conceit. Few men have had less of either.
It was part of the intense individuality by which he effected so much,
to set the high value which in general he did upon what he was striving
to accomplish; he could not otherwise have mastered one half the work he
designed; and we are able to form an opinion, more just now for
ourselves than it might have seemed to us then from others, of the
weight and truth of such self-judgment. The fussy pretension of small
men in great places, and the resolute self-assertion of great men in
small places, are things essentially different. _Respice finem_. The
exact relative importance of all our pursuits is to be arrived at by
nicer adjustments of the Now and the Hereafter than are possible to
contemporary judgments; and there have been some indications since his
death confirmatory of the belief, that the estimate which he thought
himself entitled to form of the labours to which his life was devoted,
will be strengthened, not lessened, by time.

Dickens proposed to himself, it will be remembered, to write at Lausanne
not only the first four numbers of his larger book, but the Christmas
book suggested to him by his fancy of a battle field; and reserving what
is to be said of _Dombey_ to a later chapter, this and its successor
will deal only with what he finished as well as began in Switzerland,
and will show at what cost even so much was achieved amid his other and
larger engagements.

He had restless fancies and misgivings before he settled to his first
notion. "I have been thinking this last day or two," he wrote on the
25th of July, "that good Christmas characters might be grown ou