attending sacred services, the fondness for Watts' poems, a copy of whose holy songs always lay on his table, showed a lingering attachment to this kind of sentiment up to the end of his life; but it existed in an attenuated form, and at no period after his youth exerted much sway over him. His predominating bent was intellectual, and this caused a certain delicacy, fastidiousness, aloofness, which kept him in the atmosphere of love as well as of light. From his youth this was his leading characteristic. As a boy he was ambitious of making a dictionary, a sign of his carefulness in the use of words, and an omen of the value he was to set on definitions and on exactness in the employment of language. At school he was an excellent scholar, at college he stood second, but was graduated first owing to the "suspension" of a brilliant classmate who might have excelled him but for the mishap of a college "riot" in which he took part. In the languages and in literature he was unusually proficient, while in mathematics,--that most abstract, severe, precise of pursuits,--his success was distinguished. In later-life his devotion to philosophy marked the man of speculative tastes. His early letters to his father, mother, sister, reveal a consciousness of his own peculiarities. Here are extracts: The course of studies adopted here [Cambridge], in the opinion of competent judges, is singularly calculated to form scholars, and moreover, correct and accurate scholars; to inure the mind to profound thought and habits of investigation and reasoning. The prospect of devoting my days to the acquisition and communication of knowledge is bright and cheering. This employment I would not exchange for the most elevated situation of wealth or power. One of the happiest steps, I think, that I have ever taken was the commencement of a course of study, and it is my wish and effort that my future progress may give substantial evidence of it. I know that my peculiar habits of mind, imperfect as they are, strongly impel me to the path of active intellectual effort; and if I am to be at any time of any use to society, or a satisfaction to myself or my friends, it will be in the way of some retired literary situation, where a fondness for study and a knowledge of books will be more requisite than the busy, calculating mind of a man in the business part of the community. I do not mean by this that any profession is desired but the one to which I have been long looking. My wish is only to enter that profession with all the enlargement of mind and extent of information which the best institutions can afford.