He tramped on
foot the ninety miles from Ecclefechan to Edinburgh University, and
remained there for four years; but among the subjects of study he cared
only for mathematics, and he left at the age of seventeen without receiving
a degree. From this time for many years his life was a painful struggle, a
struggle to earn his living, to make a place in the world, and to find
himself in the midst of his spiritual doubts and the physical distress
caused by lifelong dyspepsia and insomnia. For some years and in various
places he taught school and received private pupils, for very meager wages,
latterly in Edinburgh, where he also did literary hack-work. He had planned
at first to be a minister, but the unorthodoxy of his opinions rendered
this impossible; and he also studied law only to abandon it. One of the
most important forces in this period of his slow preparation was his study
of German and his absorption of the idealistic philosophy of Kant,
Schelling, and Fichte, of the broad philosophic influence of Goethe, and
the subtile influence of Richter. A direct result was his later very
fruitful continuation of Coleridge's work in turning the attention of
Englishmen to German thought and literature. In 1821 he passed through a
sudden spiritual crisis, when as he was traversing Leith Walk in Edinburgh
his then despairing view of the Universe as a soulless but hostile
mechanism all at once gave way to a mood of courageous self-assertion.
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