THE WINDOWof his wife reading stories to thehislittle boy,filled his pipe. He turned from the sight ofhuman ignorance and human fate and the seaeating the ground we stand on, which, had hebeen able to contemplate it fixedly might haveled to something; and found consolation intrifles so slight compared with the august themejust now before him that he was disposed to slurthat comfort over, to deprecate it, as if to becaught happy with natural appetites[%]in a world ofmisery was for an honest man the most despicableof crimes. It was true; he was for the most parthappy; he had his wife; he had his children;he had promised in six weeks’ time to talk“some nonsense” to the young men of Cardiffabout Locke, Hume, Berkeley, and the causes ofthe French Revolution. But this and his pleasure, [∧]in itVW: Line to caret. his pleasuregloryin the phrases he made, in the ardourof youth, in his wife’s beauty, in the tributes thatreached him from Swansea, Cardiff, Exeter,Southampton, Kidderminster, Oxford, Cambridge—all had to be deprecated and concealed underthe phrase “talking nonsense,” because, in effect,he had not done the thing he might have done.It was a disguise; it was the refuge of a manafraid to own his own feelings, who could not say,This is what I like—this is what I am; and ratherpitiable and distasteful to William Bankes and73
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