an intense pain and grief when it seemed to be opening to me the souls of
those who were in a close relation to me--when the rational talk, the
graceful attentions, the wittily-turned phrases, and the kindly deeds,
which used to make the web of their characters, were seen as if thrust
asunder by a microscopic vision, that showed all the intermediate
frivolities, all the suppressed egoism, all the struggling chaos of
puerilities, meanness, vague capricious memories, and indolent make-shift
thoughts, from which human words and deeds emerge like leaflets covering
a fermenting heap.

At Basle we were joined by my brother Alfred, now a handsome,
self-confident man of six-and-twenty--a thorough contrast to my fragile,
nervous, ineffectual self. I believe I was held to have a sort of half-
womanish, half-ghostly beauty; for the portrait-painters, who are thick
as weeds at Geneva, had often asked me to sit to them, and I had been the
model of a dying minstrel in a fancy picture. But I thoroughly disliked
my own physique and nothing but the belief that it was a condition of
poetic genius would have reconciled me to it. That brief hope was quite
fled, and I saw in my face now nothing but the stamp of a morbid
organization, framed for passive suffering--too feeble for the sublime
resistance of poetic production. Alfred, from whom I had been almost
constantly separated, and who, in his present stage of character and
appearance, came before me as a perfect stranger, was bent on being
extremely friendly and brother-like to me. He had the superficial
kindness of a good-humoured, self-satisfied nature, that fears no
rivalry, and has encountered no contrarieties. I am not sure that my
disposition was good enough for me to have been quite free from envy
towards him, even if our desires had not clashed, and if I had been in
the healthy human condition which admits of generous confidence and
charitable construction. There must always have been an antipathy