spirit. But,--luckily, as it proved, for the
further triumphs of his genius,--no such moderation was exercised. The
storm of invective raised around him, so utterly out of proportion with
his offences, and the base calumnies that were every where heaped upon
his name, left to his wounded pride no other resource than in the same
summoning up of strength, the same instinct of resistance to injustice,
which had first forced out the energies of his youthful genius, and was
now destined to give a still bolder and loftier range to its powers.

It was, indeed, not without truth, said of him by Goethe, that he was
inspired by the Genius of Pain; for, from the first to the last of his
agitated career, every fresh recruitment of his faculties was imbibed
from that bitter source. His chief incentive, when a boy, to distinction
was, as we have seen, that mark of deformity on his person, by an acute
sense of which he was first stung into the ambition of being great.[105]
As, with an evident reference to his own fate, he himself describes the
feeling,--

"Deformity is daring.
It is its essence to o'ertake mankind
By heart and soul, and make itself the equal,--
Ay, the superior of the rest. There is
A spur in its halt movements, to become
All that the others cannot, in such things
As still are free to both, to compensate
For stepdame Nature's avarice at first."[106]

Then came the disappointment of his youthful passion,--the lassitude and
remorse of premature excess,--the lone friendlessness of his entrance
into life, and the ruthless assault upon his first literary
efforts,--all links in that chain of trials, errors, and sufferings, by
which his great mind was gradually and painfully drawn out;--all bearing
their respective shares in accomplishing that destiny which seems to
have decreed that the triumphal march of his genius should be over the
waste and ruins of his heart. He appeared, indeed, himself to have had
an instinctive consciousness that it was out of such ordeals his
strength and glory were to arise, as his whole life was passed in
courting agitation and difficulties; and whenever the scenes around him
were too tame to furnish such excitement, he flew to fancy or memory for
"thorns" whereon to "lean his breast."

But the greatest of his trials, as well as triumphs, was yet to come.
The last stage of this painful, though glorious, course, in which fresh
power was, at