adopted, but was as eager to do justice to the doctrines and the men it
was opposed to, as to make war on what it thought their errors; and an
equal devotion to the two cardinal points of Liberty and Duty, formed a
combination of qualities as attractive to me as to all others who knew
him as well as I did. With his open mind and heart, he found no
difficulty in joining hands with me across the gulf which as yet divided
our opinions. He told me how he and others had looked upon me (from
hearsay information), as a "made" or manufactured man, having had a
certain impress of opinion stamped on me which I could only reproduce;
and what a change took place in his feelings when he found, in the
discussion on Wordsworth and Byron, that Wordsworth, and all which that
name implies, "belonged" to me as much as to him and his friends. The
failure of his health soon scattered all his plans of life, and
compelled him to live at a distance from London, so that after the first
year or two of our acquaintance, we only saw each other at distant
intervals. But (as he said himself in one of his letters to Carlyle)
when we did meet it was like brothers. Though he was never, in the full
sense of the word, a profound thinker, his openness of mind, and the
moral courage in which he greatly surpassed Maurice, made him outgrow
the dominion which Maurice and Coleridge had once exercised over his
intellect; though he retained to the last a great but discriminating
admiration of both, and towards Maurice a warm affection. Except in that
short and transitory phasis of his life, during which he made the
mistake of becoming a clergyman, his mind was ever progressive: and the
advance he always seemed to have made when I saw him after an interval,
made me apply to him what Goethe said of Schiller, "er hatte eine
furchtliche Fortschreitung." He and I started from intellectual points
almost as wide apart as the poles, but the distance between us was
always diminishing: if I made steps towards some of his opinions, he,
during his short life, was constantly approximating more and more to
several of mine: and if he had lived, and had health and vigour to
prosecute his ever assiduous self-culture, there is no knowing how much
further this spontaneous assimilation might have proceeded.
After 1829 I withdrew from attendance on the Debating Society. I had had
enough of speech-making, and was glad to carry on my private studies and
meditations without any immediate call for outward assertion of their
results. I found the fabric of my old and taught opinions giving way in
many fresh places, and I never allowed it to fall to pieces, but was
incessantly occupied in weaving it anew. I never, in the course of my
transition, was content to remain, for ever so short a time, confused
and unsettled. When I had taken in any new idea, I could not rest till I
had adjusted its relation to my old opinions, and ascertained exactly
how far its effect ought to extend in modifying or superseding them.