42 



"Friends that were mine before I crossed the flood 



Which darkly hides that vanished life from view ; 

 Wakening my love, as only brothers could 

 Tell me that all these memories are true. 



" This world is but one scene on life's great stage ; 

 My soul, to whom these visions now are given, 

 Passing beyond the darkening flood of death 

 Shall wake to fuller vision in high heaven." 



His temperament was always distinctly religious. He went 

 to Canada as a high-strung imaginative boy, who had been 

 brought up in the strictest school of Connecticut Congrega- 

 tionalism. In Montreal he was at once admitted into the 

 inner circle of the French Canadian Society, which retained 

 much of the culture and grace of the Ancien Reyime, was 

 devoutly Catholic, and was controlled by French ecclesiastics 

 of great suavity, tact and intellectual acuteness. Under these 

 influences Hunt adopted the Eoman Catholic faith, and 

 remained a devout son of the Church till after the breaking 

 out of the war of the Kebellion, when he abandoned the 

 Church as openly and with the same courage and sincerity as 

 he had shown in entering it, though in so doing he alienated 

 some of his dearest friends. Whatever may have been his 

 faults, cowardice and duplicity were not among them. 



He remained a bachelor till 1877, living during the previ- 

 ous thirty years almost always alone, but devoting a very 

 large portion of his salary to the support of his mother, 

 whom he loved and reverenced till her death, and of his two 

 sisters. 



Marrying so late in life, after his habits had become rigid, 

 and when so many years of solitude had made it difficult to 

 bend to the elastic requirements of domesticity, marriage was 

 not congenial. It interfered with his studies, and his wife and 

 he wisely decided to live apart. 



But though a hermit in his habits, he formed many warm 

 friendships, and was fond of occasional social intercourse. 

 Like all emotional natures, he was subject to periods of great 

 elation and corresponding depression, and in his estimate of 



