'I have been in one continued
state of excitement for at least the last three years,' he wrote
when he was not yet seventeen, 'and now comes the time of
exhaustion.' But he did not allow himself to rest, and a few
months later he was writing to a schoolfellow as follows: 'I
verily believe my whole being is soaked through with the wishing
and hoping and striving to do the school good, or rather to keep
it up and hinder it from falling in this, I do think, very
critical time, so that my cares and affections and conversations,
thoughts, words, and deeds look to that in voluntarily. I am
afraid you will be inclined to think this "cant" and I am
conscious that even one's truest feelings, if very frequently put
out in the light, do make a bad and disagreeable appearance; but
this, however, is true, and even if I am carrying it too far, I
do not think it has made me really forgetful of my personal
friends, such as, in particular, Gell and Burbidge and Walrond,
and yourself, my dear Simpkinson .'
Perhaps it was not surprising that a young man brought up in such
an atmosphere, should have fallen a prey at Oxford, to the
frenzies of religious controversy; that he should have been
driven almost out of his wits by the ratiocinations of W. G.
Ward; that he should have lost his faith; that he should have
spent the rest of his existence lamenting that loss, both in
prose and verse; and that he should have eventually succumbed,
conscientiously doing up brown paper parcels for Florence
Nightingale.
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