rentice, or
keeping his little circulating library in Dundee, tormenting his pure
heart with the thought of the twenty pounds which his mother has
borrowed wherewith to start him, or editing The Leeds Times, or lying
on his early deathbed, just as life seems to be opening clear and
broad before him, he

Bates not a jot of heart or hope,

but steers right onward, singing over his work, without bluster or
self-gratulation, for very joy at having work to do. There is a keen
practical insight about him, rarely combined, in these days, with his
single-minded determination to do good in his generation. His eye is
single, and his whole body full of light.

It would indeed (writes the grocer's boy, encouraging his despondent
and somewhat Werterean friend) be hangman's work to write articles
one day to be forgotten to-morrow, if that were all; but you forget
the comfort--the repayment. If one prejudice is overthrown, one
error rendered untenable; if but one step in advance be the
consequence of your articles and mine--the consequences of the labour
of all true men--are we not deeply repaid?

Or again, in a right noble letter to his noble mother:

That money of R.'s hangs like a millstone about my neck. If I had
paid it, I would never borrow again from mortal man. But do not
mistake me, mother; I am not one of those men who faint and falter in
the great battle of life. God has given me too strong a heart for
that. I look upon earth as a place where every man is set to
struggle and to work, that he may be made humble and pure-hearted,
and fit for that better land for which earth is a preparation--to
which earth is the gate . . . If men would but consider how little of
real evil there is in all the ills of which they are so much afraid--
poverty included--there would be more virtue and happiness, and less
world and Mammon-worship on earth than is. I think, mother, that to
me has been given talent; and if so, that talent was given to make it
useful to man.

And yet there is a quiet self-respect about him withal:

In my short course through life (says he in confidence to a friend at
one-and-twenty), I have never feared an enemy, or failed a friend;
and I live in the hope I never shall. For the rest, I have written
my heart in my poems; and rude and unfinished and hasty as they are,
it can be read there.

*****

From seven years of age to this very hour, I have been dependent only
on my own head and