riet Martineau as having no ear for the inner voices, yet
her whole nature was objective; it turned to practice and not to
reverie. She had her imaginative visions, as we know, and as all truly
superior minds have them, even though their main superiority happens to
be in the practical order. But her visions were limited as a landscape
set in a rigid frame; they had not the wings that soar and poise in the
vague unbounded empyrean. And she was much too sensible to think that
these moods were strong, or constant, or absorbing enough in her case to
furnish material and companionship for a life from day to day and year
to year. Nor again was it for the sake of undisturbed acquisition of
knowledge, nor cultivation of her finer faculties that she sought a
hermitage. She was not moved by thought of the famous maxim which Goethe
puts into the mouth of Leonore--

Es bildet ein Talent sich in der Stille,
Sich ein Charakter in dem Strom der Welt.

Though an intense egotist, in the good and respectable sense of
insisting on her own way of doing things, of settling for herself what
it was that she was living for, and of treading the path with a firm and
self-reliant step, yet Harriet Martineau was as little of an egotist as
ever lived, in the poor and stifling sense of thinking of the perfecting
of her own culture as in the least degree worthy of ranking among
Ends-in-themselves. She settled in the Lake district, because she
thought that there she would be most favourably placed for satisfying
the various conditions which she had fixed as necessary to her scheme of
life. 'My own idea of an innocent and happy life,' she says, 'was a
house of my own among poor improvable neighbours, with young servants
whom I might train and attach to myself, with pure air, a garden,
leisure, solitude at command, and freedom to work in peace and
quietness.'

'It is the wisest step in her life,' Wordsworth said, when he heard that
she had bought a piece of land and built a pretty house upon it; and
then he added the strangely unpoetic reason--'because the value of the
property will be doubled in ten years.' Her poetic neighbour gave her a
characteristic piece of advice in the same prudential vein. He warned
her that she would find visitors a great expense. 'When you have a
visitor,' he said, 'you must do as we did; you must say: "If you like to
have a cup of tea with us, you are very welcome; but if you want any
meat, you must pay for your b