childhood and never to lose the recollection of the curiosity and simplicity of
that age, is one of the great gifts of the poetic character," although this, he tells
us, was extraordinarily true of George Sand, but not of himself. From the age of
twelve on, a Fellowship at Oriel was the ideal of his life, and although he
became a commoner there at seventeen, his chief marvel is that he was so
immature and unimpressionable.
William Hale White[35] learned little at school, save Latin and good
penmanship, but his very life was divided into halves—Sundays and week days
—and he reflects at some length upon the immense dangers of the early teens;
the physiological and yet subtler psychic penalties of error; callousness to fine
pleasures; hardening of the conscience; and deplores the misery which a little
instruction might have saved him. At fourteen he underwent conversion,
understood in his sect to be a transforming miracle, releasing higher and
imprisoning lower powers. He compares it to the saving of a mind from vice by
falling in love with a woman who is adored, or the reclamation of a young
woman from idleness and vanity by motherhood. But as a boy he was convinced
of many things which were mere phrases, and attended prayer-meetings for the
clanship of being marked off from the world and of walking home with certain
girls. He learned to say in prayer that there was nothing good in him, that he was
rotten and filthy and his soul a mass of putrefying sores; but no one took him at
his word and expelled him from society, but thought the better of him. Soon he
began to study theology, but found no help in suppressing tempestuous lust, in
understanding the Bible, or getting his doubts answered, and all the lectures
seemed irrelevant chattering. An infidel was a monster whom he had rarely ever
seen. At nineteen he began to preach, but his heart was untouched till he read
Wordsworth's lyrical ballads, and this recreated a living God for him, melted his
heart to tears, and made him long for companionship; its effect was instantly
seen in his preaching, and soon made him slightly suspected as heretical.[36]
John Addington Symonds, in his autobiography, describes his "insect-like"
devotion to creed in the green infancy of ritualism. In his early teens at boarding-
school he and his mates, with half sincerity, followed a classmate to compline,
donned surplices, tossed censers, arranged altars in their studies, bought bits of
painted glass for their windows and illuminated crucifixes with gold dust and
vermilion. When he was confirmed, this was somewhat of an epoch. Preparation
was like a plowshare, although it turned up nothing valuable, and stimulated
esthetic and emotional ardor. In a dim way he felt God near, but he did not learn
to fling the arms of the soul in faith around the cross of Christ. Later the