640 The Little- Go. 



from his slender means, could not afford him the advantages of public 

 education, and therefore took upon himself the cultivation of his boy's 

 mind a task of small trouble indeed, where the scion showed such 

 propensities to precocious growth, yet infinitely too high an under- 

 taking for the mediocre talents of the humble vicar. Left much to 

 himself, the youthful Edward had every opportunity afforded him for 

 the indulgence of his most ceaseless occupation reading. He de- 

 voured books; abandoned to his own choice in the selection, he 

 crammed his memory with their contents, without method, without 

 design, so that his mind became in a little time a confused heap of 

 ideas, imperfect from their want of connexion, and injurious from their 

 destitution of end. He lived in a labyrinth of reflected images, and 

 memory to him was as a garden where flowers and weeds alike found 

 equal favour. His intellect was, to use the language of the great 

 Bacon, " overloaded with the learning of other men." Thus, in the 

 course of a little period, the mist over his mental vision grew denser 

 and still more dense ; imagination supplied the place of reason : he 

 lived thenceforth in a world of his own, peopled with his own thoughts, 

 painted with his own fancies, and the business of existence at length 

 became to him one continuous search after the delusive ideal to which 

 his diseased brain had given birth he looked upon the little world 

 around him with the jaundiced eye of prejudice ; there were none 

 who came near his false standard, and as at first he failed to lead them 

 by his authority, so at last he fell to pursuing them with his hate, 

 Edward, the once meek and meditative Edward, became a misan- 

 thrope ! Solitude was to him " an appetite, a feeling, and a love." 

 He shunned all society ; there was a constant scowl upon his brow ; 

 the villagers avoided him ; his own relatives grew estranged ; his fa- 

 mily felt he was lost to them. The father forgot his son, the mother 

 her offspring for he had forgotten them all long ago. Hateful and 

 hating, he left his paternal home his native land. A wanderer, he 

 crossed the Alps, and traversed on foot the territory of ancient Rome, 

 visited the shores of Greece, and journeyed onwards to Jerusalem. 

 Thus far had he travelled in the gloomy penance of a self-imposed 

 silence ; and when at length the spell was broken and he spake, 'twas 

 as a voice lifted up in the desert places, full of bitterness, of anguish, 

 and of woe. 



The length of his sojourn in the " widowed Zion, the city of the 

 desolate,'' cannot be exactly ascertained, for the precise periods both 

 of his arrival and departure remain still undetermined. Little, 

 moreover, is known of what became of him subsequently, further 

 than that an old intimate of the family, in his route through Saxony, 

 whilst at Jena, there heard of a youth of his name and description as 

 being suspected for an accomplice of Sandt, the murderer of Kotze- 

 bue. It seems he had entered the university there, then the most fa- 

 mous in all Germany, and from inquiries made by the same inform- 

 ant, had attracted no less notice in the place by his love of science 

 than by his ultra-political bias. An avowed enthusiast for liberty, he 

 had been tracked by the vigilance of the hungry police to all the se- 

 cret conclaves of the infatuated spirits in the university. Once mis- 

 anthrope, he was now fanatic ! The first in the " brotherhood" who 



