t
Carlyle, and wrote Carlyle; and that neither the thinking nor the
literary mode could ever have occurred to me without his influence;
but in my first reading of his pages, he seemed to be telling me things
which were deeply implanted in my soul already. The truth about the
matter is, probably, that he dominated me so completely that I did not
think at all of domination. But all I know is, that I seemed suddenly
to have found an unexpected and hitherto unimagined self. I leapt in
transport to encounter a majestic Me; and in this impulse I can honestly
aver that there was no tinge of vanity. I should say, rather, that
it sprang from the utter humility of the disciple who instantly,
absolutely, and unquestionably accepted the master's word. Be these
things as they may, the Carlylean gospel came to me, not as a revelation
of another's mind, but as an unveiling of a something which seemed
to have been for ever my own, though until that great hour I had not
dreamed of its possession.

I do not propose to make any immediate flight into sentiment. The thing
for which I am trying is a genuine recollection of the way in which the
growth of this emotion was marked within myself. Things are very much
otherwise to-day; but nearly three-score years ago there was a certain
purposed austerity practised by the most dutiful and praiseworthy
parents, which froze the natural budding affections of a child. Before
I had arrived at the technical age of manhood, my father had become the
dearest friend I had in the world, and the friendship lasted till his
death; but as a child I feared him. He was by nature as kindly a man as
ever lived; but he had been bred in the old rigid Calvinistic creed of
Scotland, and though I knew very well, in later years, how his heart had
rebelled against him, he was, throughout my childhood and early youth,
the embodiment of justice, certainly, so far as he could see it,
but always of an apparently unpitying severity. Any judgment of his
character based on the system of discipline in which he devoutly
believed would have been false in the extreme, for the infliction
of pain was actually abhorrent to him. I remember how, on scores of
occasions, when I put him to the ordeal of administering a hiding to
myself, his face would grow pale, and his hand would tremble.

Between my mother and myself there were none of those intimacies of
affection which make life so happy to a child. The whole atmosphere of
the house r