bubbling naphtha-spring that would have burned much the same, through whatever soil it had reached the open air.
He was born of the poorest laboring people, taught to read and write imperfectly only by means of the Sunday Schools, discouraged in any taste for books by his father lest his time, if any portion were that way bestowed, should not suffice to win his bread,—with no friends of the mind, in youthful years, except a volume of Byron, and an old German who loved to tell stories of his native land;—married at nineteen, in the hope of mingling some solace with his cup; plunged by the birth of children into deeper want, going forth to foreign lands a beggar in search of employment, returning to his own country to be received as a pauper, having won nothing but mental treasure which no man wished to buy; he found his wife and children in the workhouse, and took them thence home to lie with him on straw in an unfurnished garret. Thus passed the first half of the span allotted on earth to one made in God’s image. And during those years Prince constantly wrote into verse how such things struck him. But we cannot say that his human experiences were deep; for all these things that would have tortured other men, only pained him superficially. Into the soul of Elliott, the iron has entered; the lightest song of Beranger echocs to a melancholy sense of the defects of this world with its Tantalus destinies, a melancholy which touches it at times with celestial pathos. But life has made but little impression on Prince. Endowed by Nature with great purity of instincts, a healthy vigor of feeling more than of thought, he sees, and expresses in all his works, the happiness natural to Man. He sees him growing, gently, gradually, with no more of struggle and labour than is wanted to develope his manly strength, learning his best self from the precious teachings of domestic affections, fully and intelligently the son, the lover, the husband, the father. He sees him walking amid the infinite fair shows of Nature, kingly, yet companionable, too. He sees him offering to
