THE RANDALL FAMILY 20/
and figures, dollars and cents, machinery and traffic and railroad management and business details of every kind. Natures less intense and tenacious than his will not easily understand this, and natures less imaginative will not understand it at all. But so it was with him. The whole world of sentiment and imagination and romance, in which this true poet-soul naturally lived and moved and had its being, had become so terribly darkened for a love which sought its object in vain, that he fled from it in despair. Nothing but its exact opposite could for a time yield him a refuge or restore to him the "composure" he prized. It was Lear's flight from the agony of his daughter's ingrati- tude into the more congenial terrors of the storm : " Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks ! " It was not madness, unless it be that madness to which all genius is akin ; but it was a profound sensitiveness which is a sealed book to the prosaic temperament. If I could not have understood it, Randall would never have made me his friend. It took all these causes combined, — distrust of himself as a bread- winner, distrust of the inflation-prosperity which followed the civil war, a deep sense of responsibility for those de- pendent on him, a morbid fear of losing his independence through poverty, and above all the vehemence of a sorrow which had turned the bright world of romance into a tort- ure-chamber, — it took all these causes to explain the sud- den plunge of such a soul into that maelstrom of money- getting which was alien to his every instinct.
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