Boyhood (1840-1856)
keeps his promise to help me in setting up the shop, our nuptials cannot be consumed."
Disillusionment of a kind, salted with humorous penetration and insight, was the great gift bestowed upon the introspective boy by this fortunate occupation. This part of his early training cannot fail to bring to mind the parallel case of Richardson, whose experience in writing model love-letters for others less gifted than himself in expressing supercharged emotions in a polite and graceful way led him to the composition of the first great English epistolary novel. Richardson, however, actually composed his perfumed screeds, while Hardy remained a mere amanuensis.
Thus Hardy passed the first sixteen years of his life: quiet, self-contained, shy, backward, aloof and generally uncomfortable when in the presence of other human beings. Drawn largely within himself, he learned to worship nature in his own peculiar fashion: to view its cosmic moods as the manifestations of an awful but indifferent Personality; to view the ferment of the same Personality in the souls and actions of men with less awe, but with added sympathy, recognizing in them the model of himself.
In 1856 his parents took thought. What were they to make of the youth? He was out of school, idle, preoccupied with himself. He had been able to cultivate but few companions. A social career was impossible, likewise was a university residence. He would inherit little or no income. Travel also was financially impracticable. To let him work with country swains of his own age, at farming or in an industry of some sort, would
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