Hampstead was my Passy--the
Leg-of-Mutton Pond my Mare d'Auteuil; Richmond was my St. Cloud, with
Kew Gardens for a Bois de Boulogne; and Hampton Court made a very fair
Versailles--how incomparably fairer, even a pupil of Lintot's
should know.
And after such healthy fatigue and fragrant impressions the tenpenny
dinner had a better taste, the little front parlor in Pentonville was
more like a home, the book more like a friend.
For I read all I could get in English or French.
[Illustration]
Novels, travels, history, poetry, science--everything came as grist to
that most melancholy mill, my mind.
I tried to write; I tried to draw; I tried to make myself an inner life
apart from the sordid, commonplace ugliness of my outer one--a private
oasis of my own; and to raise myself a little, if only mentally, above
the circumstances in which it had pleased the Fates to place me.[A]
[Footnote A: _Note_--It Is with great reluctance that I now come to my
cousin's account of deplorable opinions he held, at that period of his
life, on the most important subject that can ever engross the mind of
man. I have left out _much_, but I feel that in suppressing it
altogether, I should rob his sad story of all its moral significance;
for it cannot be doubted that most of his unhappiness is attributable to
the defective religious training of his childhood, and that his parents
(otherwise the best and kindest people I have ever known) incurred a
terrible responsibility when they determined to leave him "unbiased," as
he calls it, at that tender and susceptible age when the mind is
"Wax to receive, marble to retain.
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