So also his will
was strong and imperious at times, but vacillating.
It could not be said that he was not ambitious He would have desired
success in order to secure a kindly recognition and to obviate the jars
and harshness of life. But no one prevailing impulse had ever enlisted
his full powers. He saved money, with a general indefinite notion of
some day becoming a capitalist, and also gave much time to studies of
various sorts. He learned music among the rest, after coming of age, and
composed music of his own, using as an inspiration a favorite poem,
picture, or character. These compositions were marked by a quaintness
like that--if a comparison may be made to something tangible--, of a
Chinese vase or a broken bronze figure. His family, the Barwoods, had
been from the earliest times a race of shrewd and driving New England
storekeepers, the very antipodes of sentiment and dilettanteism. Such
incongruities are among the compensations of nature. The Holbrook farm
was the one locality, and Nina Holbrook the one figure, in the generally
sombre prospect which Barwood saw about him, that gleamed in sunshine.
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