Then all the charm Is broken—all that phantom-world so fair Vanished, and a thousand circlets spread, And each misshapes the other. COLERIDGE.
“Abstracted in his habits, quiet and sensitive, from his reveries in dream-land, the orphan woke to find himself the inmate of a new home.
“Mrs. Winter, the only sister of the late Mr. Talbot, was wholly unlike her brother. With little taste for the elegancies of life, except so far as she thought their possession would give her importance in the eyes of others, with no sympathy for any ambition save that of acquiring money, she looked with no very favorable eye on her brother’s orphan. Dazzled by the prospect of a carriage, a town and country-house in perspective, she had married a man of sixty, when she was barely sixteen, and could never forgive her brother for not falling in with her scheme of catching the rich heiress, who, she avowed, waited but the asking to change the name of Miss Patty Pringle, for the more lofty-sounding title of Mrs. Percy Talbot. But Percy Talbot preferred the portionless Isabel Morton, and the monotony of a counting-room, to the bank-stock, real estate, and soulless face of Miss Patty Pringle. Hence there was little intercourse between the brother and sister, and when the younger Talbot sought the shelter of his aunt’s roof, she animadverted with great bitterness on the folly of people gratifying a taste for luxuries beyond their means, and encouraging boys without a shilling to spend their time in reading books and daubing canvas.
“Nor could Mrs. Winter refrain from talking of stupidity, when Paul sat quietly at his drawing, while her own sons were making the house ring with their boisterous mirth. The boys, catching the spirit of their mother, ridiculed Paul’s sketches, and with the petty tyranny of little minds, subjected him to every annoyance, and taunted him with his dependent state. The proud, sensitive boy, writhed under such treatment, and determined on leaving the relatives who had neither tastes nor sympathies in common with his own.
“When at the age of twelve years, he hung over the landscape he was trying to imitate, and from which no boyish sports could lure him; when he saw the sketch grow beneath his touch, and look more and more like the original, until in the exultation of his young heart, he exclaimed, ‘I knew that I could do it if I did but try,’ he unconsciously displayed that perseverance of character without which no one can hope to attain eminence. And now that same energy was employed in seeking means to gain a livelihood without being subjected to the bitterness of insult.