he companions of his happiest
days. He had wit enough to torture half his waking hours with
self-analysis, and to grit his teeth at his own impotence. But there was
no strength, no virile grip to take his fate in his own hands and mould
it like a man. He only mourned his disadvantages, and sometimes blamed
destiny, sometimes a congenital infirmity of purpose, for the dreary
course of his life. Nature alone could charm his sullen moods, and that
not always. Now and again she spread over the face of his existence a
transitory contentment and a larger hope; but the first contact with
facts swept it away again. His higher aspirations were neither deep nor
enduring, and yet the man's love of nature was lofty and just, and
represented all the religion he had. No moral principles guided him,
conscience never pricked. Nevertheless, thus far he had been a clean
liver and an honest man. Vice, because it affronted his sense of the
beautiful and usually led towards death, did not attract him. He lived
too deep in the lap of Nature to be deceived by the pseudo-realism then
making its appearance in literature, and he laughed without mirth at
these pictures from city-bred pens at that time paraded as the whole
truth of the countryman's life. The later school was not then above the
horizon; the brief and filthy spectacle of those who dragged their
necrosis, marasmus, and gangrene of body and mind across the stage of
art and literature, and shrieked Decay, had not as yet appeared to make
men sicken; the plague-spot, now near healed, had scarce showed the
faintest angry symptom of coming ill. Hicks might under no circumstances
have been drawn in that direction, for his morbidity was of a different
description. Art to this man appeared only in what was wholesome; it
even embraced a guide to conduct, for it led him directly to Nature, and
Nature emphatically taught him the value of obedience, the punishment of
weakness, the reward for excess and every form of self-indulgence. But a
softness in him shrank from these aspects of the Mother. He tried vainly
and feebly to dig some rule of life from her smiles alone, to read a
sermon into her happy hours of high summer sunshine. Beauty was his
dream; he possessed natural taste, and had cultivated the same without
judgment. His intricate disposition and extreme sensitiveness frightened
him away from much effort at self-expression; yet not a few trifling
scraps and shreds of lyric poetry had fallen