THE BIRKBECK INSTITUTION. 237 



last year or so, having climbed my roughest eminences, 

 and not feeling a continuance of the strain to be neces- 

 sary, I was content if found well submerged in my tub 

 before the clock of St. Elizabeth had finished ringing 

 out six in the morning. 



Early risers are sometimes described as insufferable 

 people. They are, it is said, self-righteous filled with 

 the pharisaical " Lord, I thank thee that I am not as 

 other men are ! " It may be so, but we have now to 

 deal not with generalisations but with facts. My 

 going to Germany had been opposed by some of my 

 friends as quixotic, and my life there might perhaps 

 be not unfairly thus described. I did not work for 

 money; I was not even spurred by "the last infirmity 

 of noble minds/* I had been reading Fichte, and 

 Emerson, and Carlyle, and had been infected by the 

 spirit of these great men. Let no one persuade you 

 that they were not great men. The Alpha and Omega 

 of their teaching was loyalty to duty. Higher knowl- 

 edge and greater strength were within reach of the 

 man who unflinchingly enacted his best insight. It 

 was a noble doctrine, though it may sometimes have 

 inspired exhausting disciplines and unrealisable hopes. 

 At all events it held me to my work, and in the long, 

 cold mornings of the German winter, defended by a 

 Schlafrock lined with catskin, I usually felt a fresh- 

 ness and strength a joy in mere living and working, 

 derived from perfect health which was something dif- 

 ferent from the malady of self-righteousness. 



At Marburg I attended the lectures of many of the 

 eminent men above mentioned, concentrating my chief 

 attention, however, on mathematics, physics, and 

 chemistry. I should like to have an opportunity of 

 subjecting these lectures, especially those of Bunsen, to 

 a riper judgment than mine was at that time. I 



