can be little doubt that a very different result would have ensued.  Not only would such an excitement have been insufficient to waken up the new energies still dormant in him, but that consciousness of his own errors, which was for ever livelily present in his mind, would, under such circumstances, have been left, undisturbed by any unjust provocation, to work its usual softening and, perhaps, humbling influences on his spirit.  But,—­luckily, as it proved, for the further triumphs of his genius,—­no such moderation was exercised.  The storm of invective raised around him, so utterly out of proportion with his offences, and the base calumnies that were every where heaped upon his name, left to his wounded pride no other resource than in the same summoning up of strength, the same instinct of resistance to injustice, which had first forced out the energies of his youthful genius, and was now destined to give a still bolder and loftier range to its powers.

It was, indeed, not without truth, said of him by Goethe, that he was inspired by the Genius of Pain; for, from the first to the last of his agitated career, every fresh recruitment of his faculties was imbibed from that bitter source.  His chief incentive, when a boy, to distinction was, as we have seen, that mark of deformity on his person, by an acute sense of which he was first stung into the ambition of being great.[105] As, with an evident reference to his own fate, he himself describes the feeling,—­

                      “Deformity is daring. 
    It is its essence to o’ertake mankind
    By heart and soul, and make itself the equal,—­
    Ay, the superior of the rest.  There is
    A spur in its halt movements, to become
    All that the others cannot, in such things
    As still are free to both, to compensate
    For stepdame Nature’s avarice at first."[106]

Then came the disappointment of his youthful passion,—­the lassitude and remorse of premature excess,—­the lone friendlessness of his entrance into life, and the ruthless assault upon his first literary efforts,—­all links in that chain of trials, errors, and sufferings, by which his great mind was gradually and painfully drawn out;—­all bearing their respective shares in accomplishing that destiny which seems to have decreed that the triumphal march of his genius should be over the waste and ruins of his heart.  He appeared, indeed, himself to have had an instinctive consciousness that it was out of such ordeals his strength and glory were to arise, as his whole life was passed in courting agitation and difficulties; and whenever the scenes around him were too tame to furnish such excitement, he flew to fancy or memory for “thorns” whereon to “lean his breast.”