His employers paid him as they chose, in shirts, in a chair or a table, in books, in money, and sometimes they never paid him at all.

The prodigious exuberance of his nature inspired him with a sovereign indifference to material details.

From the beginning he belonged to those to whom it comes by nature to count life more than meat, and the body than raiment.

The outward things of existence were to him really outward.

They never vexed or absorbed his days and nights, nor overcame his vigorous constitutional instinct for the true proportions of external circumstance.