From one parent I inherited an extraordinarily active and sensitive imagination,--from the other, a sturdy practical sense, a disposition to weigh and balance with calm fairness the puzzling questions which life offers to every man. These conflicting qualities--as is usual in all similar natures--were not developed in equal order of growth. The former governed my childhood, my youth, and enveloped me with spells, which all the force of the latter and more slowly ripened faculty was barely sufficient to break. Luxuriant weeds and brambles covered the soil which should have been ploughed and made to produce honest grain. Unfortunately, I had no teacher who was competent to understand and direct me. The task was left for myself, and I can only wonder, after all that has occurred, how it has been possible for me to succeed. Certainly, this success has not been due to any vigorous exercise of virtue on my part, but solely to the existence of that cool, reflective reason which lay _perdue_ beneath all the extravagances of my mind. I possessed, even as a child, an unusual share of what phrenologists call Concentrativeness. The power of absorption, of self-forgetfulness, was at the same time a source of delight and a torment. Lost in some wild dream or absurd childish speculation, my insensibility to outward things was chastised as carelessness or a hardened indifference to counsel. With a memory almost marvellous to retain those things which appealed to my imagination, I blundered painfully over the commonest tasks. While I frequently repeated the Sunday hymn, at dinner, I was too often unable to give the least report of the sermon. Withdrawn into my corner of the pew, I gave myself up, after the enunciation of the text, to a complete abstraction, which took no note of time or place. Fixing my eyes upon a knot in one of the panels under the pulpit, I sat moveless during the hour and a half which our worthy old clergyman required for the expounding of the seven parts of his discourse. They could never accuse me of sleeping, however; for I rarely even winked. The closing hymn recalled me to myself, always with a shock, or sense of pain, and sometimes even with a temporary nausea.