Autobiography of Henry Taylor 18001875 Author:Henry Taylor Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Chapter III. EARLY MANHOOD AT WITTON-LE-WEAR.—INFLUENCE OF MY STEPMOTHER, OF MISS FENWICK, AND OF SOUTHEY.—FIRST APPEARANCE IN PRINT. Anno Dom. 1821-23. An... more »no MT. 21-23. Shoktlt before I had gone abroad, my father, then forty-six years old, had married (November 14, 1818) a lady of about the same age, to whom he had long been atached, and had removed from St. Helen's Auckland to a small house near the east coast, about half-way between Newcastle and Sunderland; whence again, in about a year, he removed to Witton-le-Wear, the village where he had been at school; and there he remained till his death, thirty-two years afterwards. It has been my fortune throughout life to be connected, by relationship, marriage, and friendship, with remarkable women. I suppose my stepmother had faults, like other people, but I never could find out what they were. She was gentle and affectionate, and yet firm and strong; deeply religious and wholly unworldly; she was " true as Truth's simplicity, And simple as the infancy of Truth ;" she had read well, though not widely; and she was wise —perhaps all the wiser for not having addicted herself to thinking thoughts, or thinking for thinking's sake or for the sense of intellectual power; a practice by which intellectual ambition is apt to "o'erlenp itself And full o' the other." Unperplexed by aims or efforts of this kind, but regarding with a singular intellectual acuteness what life and observation presented, she had a direct and undisturbed insight into human 'nature and a just and penetrating judgment. And to her other gifts there was added what, when I first came to live with her, made her society especially pleasant to me—a lively wit and a keen sense of the ridiculous. Something lively was much wanted at Witton Hall. The stran...« less