THE RANDALL FAMILY 6 1
relations with his father, I never doubted in the least, and it plainly appears above in Ingersoll's letter. Dr. John Randall was a man of iron will, disguised to the world by great suavity and polish of manner, but manifested to his family in a despotic and often capricious arbitrariness that brought much misery to those whom, doubtless, he sin- cerely loved. This was a state of facts which might well be veiled in charitable and pitying silence, if it had not blasted the hopes, ruined the career, and frustrated the life of one of the most gifted men of our time. The only son possessed a will as inflexible and unconquerable as that of the father ; and the long collision of two such natures, sometimes fierce, always tragical, ended in suffering and defeat for both. The father sank into the grave at last, disappointed in his overmastering desire of seeing his son succeed him in the profession in which he himself had achieved a brilliant success. The son lived on, educated for a professional career he abhorred, diverted from the scientific and literary career he desired, and driven into a seclusion from the world which his early companions beheld in dull, uncomprehending wonder. If Randall had not had a temperament of extraordinary sensitiveness to all impressions from without, combined with an unsur- passed energy of resistance to what influences soever sought to drive or tempt him from his own fixed purpose, — if the untimely death of his friend Ingersoll, to whom he clung with a love passing the love of woman, had not rendered the execution of his fixed purpose impossible, and thus withered his life at the root, — even the father's mis- take would hardly have so injured and embittered the son. An education false to the bent of his strongly individual mind, a tragedy of the heart that brought to him long years of despair : was there reason to wonder, if
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