Not a rebel but a son, I said; willing to suffer when
Heaven said, Thou shalt;--and withal, what is perhaps rarer in such a
combination, willing to rejoice also, and right cheerily taking the good
that was sent, whensoever or in whatever form it came.

A pious soul we may justly call him; devoutly submissive to the will
of the Supreme in all things: the highest and sole essential form which
Religion can assume in man, and without which all forms of religion are
a mockery and a delusion in man. Doubtless, in so clear and filial a
heart there must have dwelt the perennial feeling of silent worship;
which silent feeling, as we have seen, he was eager enough to express by
all good ways of utterance; zealously adopting such appointed forms and
creeds as the dignitaries of the World had fixed upon and solemnly named
recommendable; prostrating his heart in such Church, by such accredited
rituals and seemingly fit or half-fit methods, as his poor time and
country had to offer him,--not rejecting the said methods till they
stood convicted of palpable unfitness and then doing it right gently
withal, rather letting them drop as pitiably dead for him, than angrily
hurling them out of doors as needing to be killed. By few Englishmen
of his epoch had the thing called Church of England been more loyally
appealed to as a spiritual mother.

And yet, as I said before, it may be questioned whether piety, what we
call devotion or worship, was the principle deepest in him. In spite of
his Coleridge discipleship, and his once headlong operations following
thereon, I used to judge that his piety was prompt and pure rather than
great or intense; that, on the whole, religious devotion was not the
deepest element of him. His reverence was ardent and just, ever ready
for the thing or man that deserved revering, or seemed to deserve it:
but he was of too joyful, light and hoping a nature to go to the depths
of that feeling, much more to dwell perennially in it. He had no fear
in his composition; terror and awe did not blend with his respect of
anything. In no scene or epoch could he have been a Church Saint, a
fanatic enthusiast, or have worn out his life in passive martyrdom,
sitting patient in his grim coal-mine, looking at the "three ells" of
Heaven high overhead there. In sorrow he would not dwell; all sorrow
he swiftly subdued, and shook away from him. How could you have made an
Indian Fakir of the Greek Apollo, "whose bright eye lends brigh