My Library

destined to bear a child, and that child the man of these volumes—in the very midst of the conditions here sketched, under these conditions he was born. As already stated, beneath this woman’s heart there slumbered the fires of a volcano, intense, fervent, quenchless, the result alike of her peculiar ancestry and peculiar training. Her full soul became re-incarnate in the son she bore; and with it she endowed the child with her own intense desire to love and be loved; all her mystic spirit, her love of mystery; all her unearthly aspiration toward unearthly association; all her resolute, yet halfdesponding, quick, impulsive, passionate, generous nature; all, all, found in him a local habitation and a name, and that name was Genius. Thus moulded came he into the world, doomed from birth to strange and bitter experiences—to face alone and unfriended the bitter blasts of wintry storms, and the burning heats of summer suns; to cling to the hope of speedy death, all the while grasping existence with tenfold the tenacity of others, yet daily pleading for life—strange contradiction!—dear life, at the world’s stern bar; pleading daily, yet as often losing his suit, and being by that world sentenced to be utterly cast adrift on the fickle tide of Fate and Chance, and that too with a mind and body acutely sensitive, and constantly