But all this was the shadow of a very sensitive and melancholy
temperament. Comparatively little is known of the first forty years
of his life; it is after that time that the elaborate legend
begins. Till the time of his marriage, he must have been a constant
anxiety to his friends; his gloom, his inertia, his drifting
mooning ways, his hypochondria, his incapacity for any settled plan
of life, all seemed to portend an ultimate failure. But this
troubled inertness was the soil of his inspiration; his conceptions
took slow and stately shape. He never suffered from the haste,
which as Dante says "mars all decency of act." After that time he
enjoyed a great domestic happiness, and practised considerable
sociability. His terrifying demeanour, his amazing personal dignity
and majesty, the certainty that he would say whatever came into his
head, whether it was profound and solemn, or testy and
discourteous, gave him a personal ascendancy that never
disappointed a pilgrim.
But he lived all his life in a perpetual melancholy, feeling the
smallest slights acutely, hating at once obscurity and publicity,
aware of his renown, yet shrinking from the evidences of it.
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