I had lived upon bread and tea
because I thought that if antiquity found locust and wild honey
nutritive, my soul was strong enough to need no better. I was always
planning some great gesture, putting the whole world into one scale
of the balance and my soul into the other, and imagining that the
whole world somehow kicked the beam. More than thirty years have
passed and I have seen no forcible young man of letters brave the
metropolis without some like stimulant; and all, after two or three,
or twelve or fifteen years, according to obstinacy, have understood
that we achieve, if we do achieve, in little diligent sedentary
stitches as though we were making lace. I had one unmeasured
advantage from my stimulant: I could ink my socks, that they might
not show through my shoes, with a most haughty mind, imagining
myself, and my torn tackle, somewhere else, in some far place 'under
the canopy ... i' the city of kites and crows.'
In London I saw nothing good, and constantly remembered that
Ruskin had said to some friend of my father's--'As I go to my work
at the British Museum I see the faces of the people become daily
more corrupt.
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