and storing knowledge purely for the love of it. Every day, every hour had its allotted employment: engagements to publishers requiring punctual fulfilment; the current expenses of a large household duty to provide for: Southey had no crop growing while his pen was idle. "My ways," he used to say, "are as broad as the king's high-road, and my means lie in an inkstand."
Robert Nicoll wrote to a friend, after reading the 'Recollections of Coleridge,' "What a mighty intellect was lost in that man for want of a little energy—a little determination!" Nicoll himself was a true and brave spirit, who died young, but not before he had encountered and overcome great difficulties in life. At his outset, while carrying on a small business as a bookseller, he found himself weighed down with a debt of only twenty pounds, which he said he felt "weighing like a millstone round his neck," and that, "if he had it paid he never would borrow again from mortal man." Writing to his mother at the time he said, "Fear not for me, dear mother, for I feel myself daily growing firmer and more hopeful in spirit. The more I think and reflect and thinking, not reading, is now my occupation—I feel that, whether I be growing richer or not, I am growing a wiser man, which is far better. Pain, poverty, and all the other wild beasts of life which so affrighten others, I am so bold as to think I could look in the face without shrinking, without losing respect for myself, faith in man's high destinies, or trust in God. There is a point which it costs much mental toil and struggling to gain, but which, when once gained, a man can look down from, as a traveller from a lofty mountain, on storms raging below,
