was the case with Father Hecker. The extraordinary
influences already mentioned continued to dominate his intelligence
and his will, sometimes with, oftener without, explicit assignment of
any cause. It is plain enough that, up to the time when they began,
he had looked forward to such a future of domestic happiness as
honest young fellows in his position commonly desire. "He was the
life of the family circle," says one who knew the Hecker household
intimately; "he loved his people, and was loved by them with great
intensity, and his going away must have been most painful to him as
well as to them."

On this point the memoranda, so often to be referred to, contain some
words of his own to the same purport. They were spoken early in 1882:
"You know I had to leave my business--a good business it was getting
to be, too. I tell you, it was agony to give everything up--friends,
prospects in life and old associates; things for which by nature I
had a very strong attachment. But I could not help it; I was driven
from it. I wanted something more; something I had not been able to
find. Yet I did not know what I wanted. I was simply in torment."

The truth is that, while he had always cherished ideals higher than
are usual, still they were not such as need set him apart from the
common life of men. But now he became suddenly averse from certain
pursuits and pleasures, not only good in themselves, but consonant to
his previous dispositions. The road to wealth lay open before him,
but his feet refused to tread it. He was invincibly drawn to poverty,
solitude, sacrifice; modes of life from which he shrank by nature,
and which led to no goal that he could see or understand. There is no
name so descriptive of such impulses as supernatural.

________________________

CHAPTER IV

LED BY THE SPIRIT

THE earliest of the letters so fortunately preserved by the affection
of Isaac Hecker's kindred is addressed to his mother, from Chelsea,
and bears date December 24, 1842. After giving some details of his
arrival, and of the kindly manner in which he had been received, he
writes:*

[* We have corrected some slight errors of orthography and
punctuation in these early letters. They were of the sort to be
expected from a self-trained youth, as yet little used to the written
expression of his thoughts. They soon disappear almost entirely.]

"But as regards your advice to write my thoughts to you, that is an
impossibility which I