disdain for primary meanings, for the immediate gross reports of the senses. His imagination he sets continually at work contriving an avenue of escape from the vulgar and the humdrum. On a fine day in February he notes as follows the aspiration of the poor wingless biped man to raise himself a little above the earth: "How much mud and mire, how many pools of unclean water, how many slippery foot-steps, and perchance heavy tumbles, might be avoided, if one could tread but six inches above the crust of this world. Physically we cannot do this; our bodies cannot; but it seems to me that our hearts and minds may keep themselves above moral mudpuddles and other discomforts of the soul's pathway."
To the development of his peculiar imaginative faculty it would not be difficult to show that his circumstances, far from being inauspicious, were highly favorable—as favorable, perhaps, as exile in Ireland was to his favorite poet, the author of The Faerie Queene. Solitude drives the hungry man to intensive cultivation of the inner life, and a plain domicile reminds him of the necessity of building for his soul a more stately mansion. After his engagement to Sophia Peabody, looking back in 1840 upon the long lonely years when he was learning his art in the locked room in Salem, he feels the pathos of his earnest and externally cheerless prime, and yet he testifies, in a passage deeply moving and beautiful, that those were the richest and
