These hardships he concealed from the people at Twybridge.  Complaint, it seemed to him, would be ungrateful, for sacrifices were already made on his behalf.  His father, as he well remembered, was wont to relate, with a kind of angry satisfaction, the miseries through which he had fought his way to education and the income-tax.  Old enough now to reflect with compassionate understanding upon that life of conflict, Godwin resolved that he too would bear the burdens inseparable from poverty, and in some moods was even glad to suffer as his father had done.  Fortunately he had a sound basis of health, and hunger and vigils would not easily affect his constitution.  If, thus hampered, he could outstrip competitors who had every advantage of circumstance, the more glorious his triumph.

Sunday was an interval of leisure.  Rejoicing in deliverance from Sabbatarianism, he generally spent the morning in a long walk, and the rest of the day was devoted to non-collegiate reading.  He had subscribed to a circulating library, and thus obtained new publications recommended to him in the literary paper which again taxed his stomach.  Mere class-work did not satisfy him.  He was possessed with throes of spiritual desire, impelling him towards that world of unfettered speculation which he had long indistinctly imagined.  It was a great thing to learn what the past could teach, to set himself on the common level of intellectual men; but he understood that college learning could not be an end in itself, that the Professors to whom he listened either did not speak out all that was in their minds, or, if they did, were far from representing the advanced guard of modern thought.  With eagerness he at length betook himself to the teachers of philosophy and of geology.  Having paid for these lectures out of his own pocket, he felt as if he had won a privilege beyond the conventional course of study, an initiation to a higher sphere of intellect.  The result was disillusion.  Not even in these class-rooms could he hear the word for which he waited, the bold annunciation of newly discovered law, the science which had completely broken with tradition.  He came away unsatisfied, and brooded upon the possibilities which would open for him when he was no longer dependent.

His evening work at home was subject to a disturbance which would have led him to seek other lodgings, could he have hoped to find any so cheap as these.  The landlady’s son, a lank youth of the clerk species, was wont to amuse himself from eight to ten with practice on a piano.  By dint of perseverance he had learned to strum two or three hymnal melodies popularised by American evangelists; occasionally he even added the charm of his voice, which had a pietistic nasality not easily endured by an ear of any refinement.  Not only was Godwin harassed by the recurrence of these performances; the tunes worked themselves into his brain, and sometimes throughout a whole day their burden clanged and squalled incessantly on his mental hearing.  He longed to entreat forbearance from the musician, but an excess of delicacy—­which always ruled his behaviour—­kept him silent.  Certain passages in the classics, and many an elaborate mathematical formula, long retained for him an association with the cadences of revivalist hymnody.