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A Biography, Compiled From His Papers and Correspondence
A Biography Compiled From His Papers and Correspondence Author:John Addington Symonds Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. Excerpt from book: Chapter Xii textit{MANHOOD—RELIGIOUS DEVELOPMENT Recovers slowly.—Happiness.—His statement of his religion.—Childhood.—Harrow.—Oxford.—"Essays and Reviews."—Comtism.— The cosmic enthusiasm.—Goe... more »the.—Cleanthes.—Walt Whitman. —Darwin.—Conclusion. A1 Great peace came over me, as I lay for weeks in bed, forgetful of the conflict, slowly and painfully recovering a dram of strength. It was a blissful interlude in my life, those weeks in which I lay resigned to death. But life returned; and though I was maimed and bruised, definitely convicted of actual phthisis, I felt the call to live. When I got up at last from my sick bed, I could hardly recognise myself as the same person. The struggle for mere life had now absorbed and superseded the struggle for what I sought in life. I seemed for the moment like a man new born. I was a child in the hands of something divine, to which I responded with an infinite gratitude. So preoccupied was I with the difficulty of existing that I did not then think what further existence would imply—the resumption of the burden of my personality. I employed myself to the best of my ability in settingmy worldly affairs in order—being conscious of impending death—and for the rest I exercised my literary faculty in such light work as I could do— translating the sonnets of Michelangelo Buonarroti and Tommaso Campanella, which I had begun before my illness. Never have I felt happier in the soul than during those weeks when my life was hanging on a thread, and when the sensuous faculties remained in abeyance—the real man, the self, which is immortal, being left open to only intellectual influences, and these pervading only a small portion of his total sensibility. 1 Autobiography. 107 Religion is so important a factor in man's intellectual life, and has so direct a bearing upon the growth o...« less