id	author	title	date	pages	extension	mime	words	sentence	flesch	summary	cache	txt
ward-robert-1888	ward	ward-robert-1888	1888		.txt	text/plain	292280	15052	78	According to old Meyrick, he buried his last chance of living like other men at Berlin. From the general narrative there stood out little pictures of individual persons or scenes, clear cut and masterly--of his father, the Gainsborough churchwarden; of his Methodistical mother, who had all her life lamented her own beauty as a special snare of Satan, and who since her husband's death had refused to see her son on the ground that his opinions 'had vexed his father'; of his first ardent worship of knowledge, and passion to communicate it; and of the first intuitions in lecture, face to face with an undergraduate, alone in college rooms, sometimes alone on Alpine heights, of something cold, impotent and baffling in himself, which was to stand for ever between him and action, between him and human affection; the growth of the critical pessimist sense which laid the axe to the root of enthusiasm after enthusiasm, friendship after friendship--which made other men feel him inhuman, intangible, a skeleton at the feast: and the persistence through it all of a kind of hunger for life and its satisfactions, which the will was more and more powerless to satisfy: all these Langham put into words with an extraordinary magic and delicacy of phrase.	cache/ward-robert-1888.txt	txt/ward-robert-1888.txt