CHAPTER V
These notes aim at describing merely certain surface episodes, and would leave unmentioned of set purpose those inner activities which pertain to the intimate struggles of a growing soul. There is a veil of privacy which only in rarest cases of exceptional value should be lifted. That honesty, moreover, which is an essential of such value, seems almost unattainable. Only a diary, written at the actual time and intended for no one's eye, can hope to achieve the naked sincerity, which could make it useful to lift that veil.
Yet, even with these surface episodes, something of the background against which they danced and vanished must be sketched; to understand them, something of the individual who experienced them must be known. This apology for so much use of the personal pronoun is made once for all.
The failure of the evangelical Christian teaching either to attract deeply or to convince, has been indicated. An eager, impressionable mind lay empty and unstimulated. It fed upon insipid stuff, such as Longfellow, Mrs. Hemans, goody-goody stories, and thousands of religious tracts. It was the days of yellow-backs in three volumes, of Ouida especially, of Miss Braddon, and Wilkie Collins; but novels were strictly forbidden in the house. Lewis Carroll, which my father often read aloud, and Foxe's "Book of Martyrs," which made every Roman Catholic priest seem ominous, were our imaginative fiction. But my chief personal delight was Hebrew poetry, the Psalms, the Song of Solomon, above all the Book of Job (which I devoured alone)—these moved me in a different way and far more deeply.
The mind, meanwhile, without being consciously aware of it, was searching with eager if unrewarded zeal,
