t
he came gradually to discern the sweet and patient wisdom which, after
many sorrows, nobly felt and ardently endured, filled and guided her
large and loving heart.

His father, after a highly distinguished academical career, entered the
Church; and at the time of Hugh's birth he held an important country
living together with one of the Archdeaconries of the diocese.

Hugh was the eldest child. Two other children, both sisters, were born
into the household. Hugh in later days loved to trace in family papers
the full and vivid life which had surrounded his unconscious self. His
mother had been married young, and was scarcely more than a girl when
he was born; his father was already a man grave beyond his years, full
of affairs and constantly occupied. But his melancholy moods, and they
were many, had drawn him to value with a pathetic intentness the quiet
family life. Hugh could trace in old diaries the days his father and
mother had spent, the walks they had taken, the books they had read
together. There seemed for him to brood over those days, in
imagination, a sort of singular brightness. He always thought of the
old life as going on somewhere, behind the pine-woods, if he could only
find it. He could never feel of it as wholly past, but rather as
possessing the living force of some romantic book, into the atmosphere
of which it was possible to plunge at will.

And then his own life; how vivid and delicate the perceptions were!
Looking back, it always seemed to be summer in those days. He could
remember the grassy walks of the pleasant garden, which wound among the
shrubberies; the old-fashioned flowers, sweet-williams and
Canterbury-bells, that filled the deep borders; the rose-garden, with
the pointed white buds, or the big-bellied pink roses, full of scent,
that would fall at a touch and leave nothing but an orange-seeded
stump. But there had been no thought of pathos to him in those years,
as there came to be afterwards, in the fading of sweet things; it was
all curious, delightful, strange. The impressions of sense were
tyrannously strong, so that there was hardly room for reflection or
imagination; there was the huge chestnut covered with white spires,
that sent out so heavy a fragrance in the spring that it was at last
cut down; but the felling of the tree was a mere delightful excitement,
not a thing to be grieved over. The country was very wild all round,
with tracts of heath and sand. The me