362 NATHANIEL SOUTHGATE SHALER 



For this reason but little elation was felt when he finally de- 

 cided to dedicate his life to a laborious and modest career, and 

 to take up his permanent abode beyond the borders of his own 

 state. The great compensation, however, was looked for in the 

 restoration of his shattered health. On his part, having volun- 

 tarily sought New England he cast in his lot with her ; she gave 

 him opportunities that he might not otherwise have had, and 

 he gave her the best and unstinted services of his varied talents. 

 Indeed, he embraced the new conditions in a whole-hearted way, 

 and if the old and new civilizations did not always mingle, they 

 lived amicably together : only as life neared its close there was 

 a strange longing for the one he knew first. Against the aca- 

 demic environment, against what was rigid, formal, and luke- 

 warm wherever these qualities found a home, he opposed the 

 land of passionate likings, unchastened aversions, and ancient 

 loyalties, a land where all the elements of life mingled pell-mell 

 and jostled one another with old-time Shakespearian freedom. 

 And because of this full life which had so deeply entered into his 

 being he must always have seemed to his comrades to have an 

 exotic strain in his blood. Yet, this unappeased nostalgia, this 

 reaching out for the other life, was more or less in opposition 

 to his better judgment, for he well knew that he needed for the 

 exercise of his best powers full swing in intellectual centres. 



Even those who knew the conditions of his heritage some- 

 times wondered at the evolution of so rich a personality ; ques- 

 tioned what the preexistent souls were like that started on its 

 way a nature having the sensitiveness of the poet and the vigor 

 of the man of action. How he came by this and that spiritual 

 and intellectual quality only those who knew the community 

 in which he lived could in any measure grasp ; to the outsider 

 explanation is impossible, nor would the present transformed 

 society furnish a clew. One feature of his character, loyalty to 

 persons and ideas, may in a way be laid to the door of slavery, 

 for it was an institution immense in its force to unite and bind 

 together members of the ruling class. 



