Memoirs of Arthur Hamilton, B. A. Of Trinity College, Cambridge | Page 7

ineffable satisfaction. I shall always feel for the future that there is an existent region, into which I have now actually penetrated, in which that entire satisfaction is possible, a fact which I have always hitherto doubted. It is like an initiation.
"But I can not bear the 'Tannhauser;' it seems to paint with a fatal fascination the beauty of wickedness, the rightness, so to speak, of sensuality. I feel after it as if I had been yielding to a luscious temptation; unnerved, not inspired."
In another letter he writes, "Music is the most hopeful of the arts; she does not hint only, like other expressions of beauty--she takes you straight into a world of peace, a world where law and beauty are the same, and where an ordered discord, that is discord working by definite laws, is the origin of the keenest pleasure."
I remember, during the one London season which he subsequently went through, his settling himself at a Richter concert next me with an air of delight upon his face. "Now," he said, "let us try and remember for an hour or two that we have souls."
CHAPTER III
I must here record one curious circumstance which I have never explained even to my own satisfaction.
He had been at Cambridge about two years, when, in the common consent of all his friends, his habits and behaviour seemed to undergo a complete and radical change.
I have never discovered what the incident was that occasioned this change; all I know is that suddenly, for several weeks, his geniality of manner and speech, his hilarity, his cheerfulness, entirely disappeared; a curious look of haunting sadness, not defined, but vague, came over his face; and though he gradually returned to his old ways, yet I am conscious myself, and others would support me in this, that he was never quite the same again; he was no longer young.
The only two traces that I can discover in his journals, or letters, or elsewhere, of the facts are these.
He always in later diaries vaguely alludes to a certain event which changed his view of things in general; "ever since," "since that November," "for now nearly five years I have felt." These and similar phrases constantly occur in his diary. I will speak in a moment of what nature I should conjecture it to have been.
A packet of letters in his desk were marked "to be burnt unopened;" but at the same time carefully docketed with dates: these dates were all immediately after that time, extending over ten days.
The exact day was November 8, 1872. It is engraved in a small silver locket that hung on his watch-chain, where he was accustomed to have important days in his life marked, such as the day he adopted his boy, his mother's death. It is preceded by the Greek letters [Greek: BP], which from a certain entry in his diary I conceive to be [Greek: baptisma pyros], "the baptism of fire."
Lastly, in a diary for that year, kept with fair regularity up till November 8, there here intervenes a long blank, the only entry being November 9: "Salvum me fac, Dne."
I took the trouble, incidentally, to hunt up the files of a Cambridge journal of that date, to see if I could link it on to any event, and I found there recorded, in the course of that week, what I at first imagined to be the explanation of the incidents, and own I was a good deal surprised.
I found recorded some Revivalist Mission Services, which were then held in Cambridge with great success. I at once concluded that he underwent some remarkable spiritual experience, some religious fright, some so-called conversion, the effects of which only gradually disappeared. The contagion of a Revivalist meeting is a very mysterious thing. Like a man going to a mesmerist, an individual may go, announcing his firm intention not to be influenced in the smallest degree by anything said or done. Nay more, he may think himself, and have the reputation of being, a strong, unyielding character, and yet these are the very men who are often most hopelessly mesmerized, the very men whom the Revival most absolutely--for the occasion--enslaves. And thus, knowing that one could form no prima facie judgments on the probabilities in such a matter, I came to the conclusion that he had fallen, in some degree, under the influence of these meetings.
But in revising this book, and carefully recalling my own and studying others' impressions, I came to the conclusion that it was impossible that this should be the case.
1. In the first place, he was more free than any man I ever saw from the influence of contagious emotions; he dissembled his own emotions, and contemned the public display of them in other people.
2. He had, I remember, a strange