On the physical side, I owe her an endless debt of gratitude. Her relations, who objected strongly to her marriage, had told her, among other pleasant prophecies, that 'the first thing you will have to do will be to bury that poor child'. Under the old-world sway of Miss Marks, I had slept beneath a load of blankets, had never gone out save weighted with great coat and comforter, and had been protected from fresh air as if from a pestilence. With real courage my stepmother reversed all this. My bedroom window stood wide open all night long, wraps were done away with, or exchanged for flannel garments next the skin, and I was urged to be out and about as much as possible.
All the quidnuncs among the 'saints' shook their heads; Mary Grace Burmington, a little embittered by the downfall of her Marks, made a solemn remonstrance to my Father, who, however, allowed my stepmother to carry out her excellent plan. My health responded rapidly to this change of regime, but increase of health did not bring increase of spirituality. My Father, fully occupied with moulding the will and inflaming the piety of my stepmother, left me now, to a degree not precedented, inundisturbed possession of my own devices. I did not lose my faith, but many other things took a prominent place in my mind.
It will, I suppose, be admitted that there is no greater proof of complete religious sincerity than fervour in private prayer. If an individual, alone by the side of his bed, prolongs his intercessions, lingers wrestling with his divine Companion, and will not leave off until he has what he believes to be evidence of a reply to his entreaties--then, no matter what the character of his public protestations, or what the frailty of his actions, it is absolutely certain that he believes in what he professes.
My Father prayed in private in what I may almost call a spirit of violence. He entreated for spiritual guidance with nothing less than importunity. It might be said that he stormed the citadels of God's grace, refusing to be baffled, urging his intercessions without mercy upon a Deity who sometimes struck me as inattentive to his prayers or wearied by them. My Father's acts of supplication, as I used to witness them at night, when I was supposed to be asleep, were accompanied by stretchings out of the hands, by crackings of the joints of the fingers, by deep breathings, by murmurous sounds which seemed just breaking out of silence, like Virgil's bees out of the hive, 'magnis clamoribus'.
My Father fortified his religious life by prayer as an athlete does his physical life by lung-gymnastics and vigorous rubbings.
It was a trouble to my conscience that I could not emulate this fervour. The poverty of my prayers had now long been a source of distress to me, but I could not discover how to enrich them. My Father used to warn us very solemnly against 'lip-service', by which he meant singing hymns of experience and joining in ministrations in which our hearts took no vital or personal part.
This was an outward act, the tendency of which I could well appreciate, but there was a 'lip--service' even more deadly than that, against which it never occurred to him to warn me. It assailed me when I had come alone by my bedside, and had blown out the candle, and had sunken on my knees in my night-gown. Then it was that my deadness made itself felt, in the mechanical address I put up, the emptiness of my language, the absence of all real unction.
I never could contrive to ask God for spiritual gifts in the same voice and spirit in which I could ask a human being for objects which I knew he could give me and which I earnestly desired to possess. That sense of the reality of intercession was for ever denied me, and it was, I now see, the stigma of my want of faith.
But at the time, of course, I suspected nothing of the kind, and I tried to keep up my zeal by a desperate mental flogging, as if my soul had been a peg-top.
In nothing did I gain from the advent of my stepmother more than in the encouragement she gave to my friendships with a group of boys of my own age, of whom I had now lately formed the acquaintance. These friendships she not merely tolerated, but fostered; it was even due to her kind arrangements that they took a certain set form, that our excursions started from this house or from that on regular days. I hardly know by what stages Iceased to be a lonely little creature of mock-monographs and mud-pies, and became a member of a sort of club of eight or ten active boys. The long summer holidays of 1861 were set in an enchanting brightness.
Looking back, I cannot see a cloud on the terrestrial horizon--Isee nothing but a blaze of sunshine; descents of slippery grass to moons of snow-white shingle, cold to the bare flesh; red promontories running out into a sea that was like sapphire; and our happy clan climbing, bathing, boating, lounging, chattering, all the hot day through. Once more I have to record the fact, which I think is not without interest, that precisely as my life ceases to be solitary, it ceases to be distinct. I have no difficulty in recalling, with the minuteness of a photograph, scenes in which my Father and I were the sole actors within the four walls of a room, but of the glorious life among wild boys on the margin of the sea I have nothing but vague and broken impressions, delicious and illusive.
