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from the Hartland liglithouse tower "the night rack come rolling 

 up ragged and brown ! " How he would weep with the women 

 who wrung their hands for the corpses out on the Santon sands 

 of " those who could never come home to the town ! " How he 

 would read his "Wordsworth among the trees in the Hobby Drive ! 

 A year more and he only saw Clovelly in the holidays between 

 the terms at Chfton School, when he came home to tell of the 

 bread riots he had seen in Bristol one autumn afternoon : the 

 riots that made him a radical. From Chfton with his " curse of 

 stammering," which clung to him almost throughout his life, he 

 went to Helston School, between the Lizard and Land's End. 

 Seventeen years old ; and he no more breathed the ozone of the 

 Atlantic, but the carbonic acid gas of Chelsea, where through 

 his father's promotion he was thrown into the midst of none but 

 curates and clergymen. He did his best to hide the common- 

 place of London in the chivalry of Arthur's knights and the 

 romance of Spenser's "Faerie Queene," in the few hours he 

 could spare from the Plato he was reading at King's College. 



Was it there in his daily walks to the Strand and back that he dis- 

 covered the original of the Scotch second-hand bookseller of "Alton 

 Locke," whose portrait and dialect Carlyle pronounced so perfect? 

 At nineteen Kingsley got away from stifling Chelsea, to the 

 Fens again, to jack fishing and snipe shooting, and to boating on 

 the sluggish Cam. He did very well at Magdalen, in spite of the 

 fitfulness of his studies and his fretting against the University 

 routine. It was genius rather than long plodding that won him 

 his honours. But the years at Magdalen were not lost. The 

 Dons might have thought him only a brilhant free-lance, a 

 naturalist and wild-man-of-the-woods. But there was more in 

 him than that, as he afterwards proved. Mrs. Kingsley had told 

 them that when first she knew him as a student he was fond 

 of fox-hunting, true as a poet in descriptions of nature, deep in 

 the lore of all out-of-the-way studies, Uke magic, mythology, 

 and mesmerism ; daring, and searching in all argument, roughly 

 scorning all mere appeals to authority, too earnest after facts 

 and firm truth to rest content with such woman-like appeals, 

 believing that " the blackest of all sins, the deepest ot all 

 atheisms, that which, above all things, proves no faith in God's 

 government of the universe, no sense of his presence, no under- 

 standing of His character, was a he." Yet not rehgious, indeed 

 often counted irreligious, by the very vigour of his onslaughts 

 upon falsehoods and shams. 



Oxford at this time was under the magic spell of the mystic 

 Newman — that " spiritual apparition," who, as Matthew Arnold 

 says, would " glide in the dun afternoon light through the aisles 

 of St. Mary's, rise into the pulpit, and then in the most entrancing 

 of voices break the silence with words and thoughts which were 



