ation; and yet there
is no denying that life is essentially interesting--every life, any
life, all lives, if their detailed history could be given with truth and
simplicity. For my own part, I confess that the family correspondence,
even of people utterly unknown to me, always seems to me full of
interest. The vivid interest the writers took in themselves makes their
letters better worth reading than many books we read; they are life, as
compared with imitations of it--life, that mystery and beauty surpassing
every other; they are morsels of that profoundest of all secrets, which
baffles alike the man of science, the metaphysician, artist, and poet.
And yet it would be hard if A, B, and C's letters should therefore be
published, especially as, had they contemplated my reading them, they
would doubtless never have written them, or written them quite other
than they did.

To resume my chronicle. My brother John was at this time traveling in
Germany; the close of his career at Cambridge had proved a bitter
disappointment to my father, and had certainly not fulfilled the
expectations of any of his friends or the promise of his own very
considerable abilities. He left the university without taking his
degree, and went to Heidelberg, where he laid the foundation of his
subsequent thorough knowledge of German, and developed the taste for the
especial philological studies to which he eventually devoted himself,
but his eminence in which brought him little emolument and but tardy
fame, and never in the least consoled my father for the failure of all
the brilliant hopes he had formed of the future distinction and fortune
of his eldest son. When a man has made up his mind that his son is to be
Lord Chancellor of England, he finds it hardly an equivalent that he
should be one of the first Anglo-Saxon scholars in Europe.

In my last letter to Miss S---- I have referred to some of my brother's
friends and their possible influence in determining his choice of the
clerical profession in preference to that of the law, which my father
had wished him to adopt, and for which, indeed, he had so far shown his
own inclination as to have himself entered at the Inner Temple.

Among my brother's contemporaries, his school and college mates who
frequented my father's house at this time, were Arthur Hallam, Alfred
Tennyson and his brothers, Frederick Maurice, John Sterling, Richard
Trench, William Donne, the Romillys, the Malkins, Edward Fitzger