BOOKS.

SIR WILLT A m ROWAN HAMILTON.*

Tem volume, which belongs to the Dublin University Press Series, is the first instalment of a work which, when completed, will be a worthy monument to the memory of a very dis- tinguished and remarkable man. Mr. Graves, who is perform- ing his important task not only with enthusiasm, but with fine discrimination, observes very justly that even Sir William Hamilton's world-wide reputation as one of the greatest mathe- maticians of his 'time, might not in itself demand the publica- tion of an extended memoir of his life ; but this volume alone, which leaves Hamilton at the age of twenty-seven, when his great achievement—the invention of quaternions—was still in the future, amply suffices to prove that the work of which it -forms a part is something very different from a mere addition -to the growing mass of superfluous biographies. Not only the great variety of Hamilton's powers, but the remarkably early development of some of them, give a peculiar interest to -the story of his youthful years,—years so full not merely of promise, but of performance, that Professor Sedgwick, -in referring to Hamilton, at the meeting of the British Association in 1833, could speak• of him, without sus- picion of hyperbole, as "a man who possessed within himself powers and talents perhaps never before combined within one philosophical character."

William Rowan Hamilton was born precisely at midnight, 'between August 3rd and 4th, in the year 1805. The place of his birth was Dublin, where he was destined, in less than thirty years afterwards, to win honour and fame; and Mr. Graves' patriotic instincts have led him to make investigations which

* Life of Sir William Rowan Hamilton. including Selections from his Poems, Correspondence, and Miscellaneous Writings. By Robert Perceval Graves, M.A., Sub-Dean of the Chapel Royal, Dublin. Vol. I. London : Longmans, Green, and Co.

prove conclusively that Hamilton was a tree Irishman, and that the only foundation for a Scottish claim to him is found in the fact that his maternal grandmother was of Scottish birth.

His childish acquirements were certainly very remarkable, though his precocity had hardly the all-round character which Mr. Graves seems inclined to attribute to it, being for the most part a precocity of acquisition, rather than of achievement, or even of marked originality of thought. Even when he had reached the age of sixteen, we find him making some re- marks upon the books he has been reading which are remark- able for nothing but their common-place juvenility; and the letters of his childhood and early youth are, as a rule, con- ventional and formal, such interest as they have being due, not to their style or thought, but to the glimpses given in them of the studies he is pursuing, and to their constant testimony to his early acquired elevation and steadfastness of moral char- acter. Still, after allowing full weight to these limitations, it is clear that the little Hamilton was an extraordinary child. When he had only just passed his third birthday we find him reading English, not only printed, but written, and a year later his facility was so assured that the fact of a book being presented to him upside-down made no difference to the little reader.

These, however, are mere trifles, in comparison with other items in the record. At four years and five months old he read Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, the last with the points ; and when just eight years of age his command of Latin was such that, during a walk through a beautiful landscape, he delivered in that lan- guage an extemporaneous and unpremeditated expression of his admiration of the scene. By this time French and Italian had

been added to his acquisitions; at nine he had a fair knowledge of Arabic, and was beginning with eagerness the study of Sanscrit ; and the sum-total of his linguistic accomplishments may be gathered from a letter written by his father, three

months before William had completed his tenth year. Mr. Archibald Hamilton proudly writes of his little son:—

" There is every reason for a well-founded hope that he will at least be a very learned man, and, I trust, also a very worthy char- acter. His thirst for the Oriental languages is unabated. He is now master of most, indeed of all except the minor and comparatively provincial ones. The Hebrew, Persian, and Arabic are about to be confirmed by the superior and intimate acquaintance with the San- suit, in which he is already a proficient. The Chaldee and Syriac he is grounded in, and the Hindoostanee, Malay, Mahratti, Bengali, and others. He is about to commence the Chinese, but the difficulty of procuring books is very great. It cost me a large sum to supply him from London, but I hope the money was well expended."

We may, without injustice either to father or son, assume that the words " master " and " proficient " are here used in an accommodated sense, and are not intended to represent what

would be ordinarily understood by students as masterhood and proficiency; but for a boy of nine to possess even a smattering of all these languages is extraordinary enough, and that young

Hamilton's knowledge was very much more than a smattering is abundantly manifest. Considered as an illustration of the absurdity of the old-fashioned doctrine that precocity in youth is the inevitable antecedent of dullness in maturity, the case, though extraordinary, is one of many ; its peculiarity lies in the fact that while Hamilton's adult achievements fully justified the promise of his childhood, they were of an entirely different character from what might have been expected, the marvellous linguist developing into the great mathematician.

The first indication of that interest in mathematical studies which was to grow into an absorbing passion is found in a letter, written at the age of fourteen, in which Hamilton tells his father that he has "made a kind of epitome of algebra," which seems to have been a somewhat elaborate affair, covering six closely- written folio pages, and proceeding as far as quadratic equa- tions. Soon after this, we hear for the first time of his astro- nomical bent, manifesting itself for the time mainly in a passion for the observation of eclipses, which, in many letters of this period, are spoken of as if they were to the writer the most im- portant and interesting of all possible events. The sphere of his astronomical investigations rapidly widened, but we must not linger over matters which are of interest mainly as leading up to the first great event of Hamilton's life,— his appointment as Andrew? Professor of Astronomy in the University of Dublin, and Royal Astronomer of Ireland. He was now only twenty-one years of age, but both in the special faculties which won for him so unique an honour, and in the general mental force and fertility by which he was to be almost equally distinguished, his growth had been extraordinarily rapid. This rapidity was hardly to be wondered at, seeing that his intellectual life was lived in a heated atmosphere of high enthu- siasm, which did not exhaust, because it fed, at the same time that it stimulated. Four years before the event just referred to, he wrote to his sister Eliza :—

"I have some curious discoveries—at least, they are so to me—to show Charles Boyton, when next we meet ; he will be my tutor soon. No lady reads a novel with more anxious interest than a mathema- tician investigates a problem, particularly if it be in any new or un- tried field of research. All the energies of his mind are called forth, all his faculties are on the stretch for the discovery. Sometimes an unexpected difficulty starts up, and he almost despairs of success. Often, if he be inexperienced, as I am, he will detect mistakes of his own which throw him back. But when all have been rectified, when the happy clue has been found and followed up, when the difficulties, perhaps unusually great, have been completely overcome, what is his rapture !"

If it may be declared, and surely it may, of the genius of scientific vision, as of the genius of poetical creation, that it is born, not made, what can we say but that the fine rapture of toil which expresses itself here is the cachet of this high birthright P In connection with this letter should be read another, still more noteworthy, written to the same sister five years afterwards, in which the glories, the perils, and the demands of a scientific career are celebrated with an eloquent dignity of sombre rhetoric which may well recall the voice of Milton or Jeremy Taylor. We cannot give the letter in full, but for one passage room must be found. After speaking of the public summons, which he considers the solemn call of God and his country to "the career of scientific excellence, the search into the wonders and glories of Creation, the unfolding of the laws and motions of the Universe," Hamilton continues :—

" And glorious as this race is, and high, perhaps, above all earthly honours as is the crown of fame, and usefulness, and intellectual eminence which rewards the successful competitor; yet is the path so steep, so tangled, so sore beset with difficulty and danger, that, of all who have entered upon it, how many have turned aside, or fallen by the way ! When, indeed, one reflects on the assemblage of warring qualities ; on the union of enthusiastic ardour, with calm and philosophic caution ; of the courage that shrinks not from diffi- culties, with the prudence and art that elude them ; of the observing eye that ranges over earth and heaven, with the abstracting mind that can withdraw into its own solitary realm of thought ; of the untiring zeal that still aims at unlimited excellence, with the modesty that looks upon all which it has done as nothing ; in a word, of highest imagination with clearest and strongest nmderstanding, and of transcendent genius with transcendent industry ; when (I say) one reflects on the array of warring qualities which must league together, if they would storm the citadel and win the throne of Science, how may he dare to hope them for himself, or marvel that among mankind so few have reached the prize, and that, at least among his own compatriots, none equal or second to Newton hath yet appeared ?"

In these large and liberal outlines, we recognise the features of the writer's personality. It has been truly said by a dis- tinguished living son of his own University, that in him we come face to face with the man of genius in science. He presents himself to us as a great idealist, with scientific inspira- tions, accompanied by the greatest intellectual vigour and exactness in detail. So many Idealists are vague, so many scientific men are merely positive, and creep after phenomena ; but Hamilton was an epic creator in science.

We ought to pay some more adequate tribute than that of a mere mention to the most memorable achievement of Hamil- ton's early years,—the theoretical discovery of conical reflection, afterwards experimentally verified by Lloyd ; but what remains of our space must be devoted to matters of another kind. In the ardour of his scientific enthusiasm, Hamilton never lost his love of literature. His favourite recreation was the production of verse, which, if it never rose to any great poetic height, was always characteristically noble in sentiment and graceful in expression ; and in 1827, when he was twenty-ttvo years of age, his delight in literature generally, and in poetry particularly, received a strong stimulus from the influence of a great poet with whom he came into personal contact. It was during a short tour in England in the autumn of this year that Hamilton met Wordsworth, a meeting which was the beginning of a friendship that brought into the life of the young astronomer a multitude of new interests. Many letters passed between Rydal Mount and Dublin, and once Hamilton had the pleasure of welcoming Wordsworth to his pleasant home at the Observatory. Of this visit a very interesting sketch was written by Miss Eliza Hamilton,—interesting not because it gives any new view of its subject, but because Miss Hamilton's impressions are so markedly identical with those of almost every one who knew Wordsworth not as a poet merely, but as a man. After de- scribing her first glimpse of him as he walked up the avenue with her brother—" a tall man, with grey hair, a brown coat, and nankeen trousers, on whom 'Smoke,' our black grey- hound, was jumping up in a most friendly manner, not by any means his wont with every stranger "—Miss Eliza Hamilton draws a little portrait which, for one or two touches of delicately veracious observation, deserves reproduction, though for the moment it takes us away from Hamilton :—

" There was a slight touch of rusticity and constraint about his perfect gentlemanliness of manner which I liked,—an absence of that entire ease of manner towards strangers which always tends to do away my sympathy with any mind, particularly a gifted one ; but everything he did and said had an unaffected simplicity, and dignity, and peacefulness of thought that were very striking. He was not at all a loquacious man, nor one who seemed inclined to approach with any degree of intimacy even those of whom he knew a good deal, but at the same time, one who met every advance on the part of others with a ready and attractive affability. Other men did not seem necessary to him, or to the existence of his happiness, so that his sympathy with the happiness and sorrow, the good and ill, of the whole creation as it discovers itself in his poetry, gave one the feeling of his natural character being very peculiar. There was such an indescribable superiority, both intellectual and moral, stamped upon him in his very silence, that everything of his I had thought silly immediately took the beautiful colouring of a wondrous benevol- ence, that could descend through love to the least and most insigni- ficant things among the works of God, or connected with the weal or woe of man. I think it would be quite impossible for any one who had once been in Wordsworth's company ever again to think any- thing he has written silly."

Miss Eliza Hamilton goes on to describe a conversation between Wordsworth and her brother concerning a passage in the Excursion which Hamilton considered deficient in reverence for science. In this friendly discussion, Hamilton, we think, had the best of it, for while Wordsworth's imaginative grasp of the phenomena of Nature was certainly superior to Hamilton's, there is evidence that in the mere "laws and motions of the Universe," the something in Nature which is apprehended by the pure intellect, Hamilton found an imaginative delight and in- spiration to which Wordsworth was all but a stranger. The letters from the poet to his friend in Dublin deal largely with criticism of poetry from the artistic side, and members of our loudest poetical, school who rave about "craftsmanship," and are always ready to fling a barren sneer at Wordsworth, may learn from them that if Wordsworth did not, like their master, Gautier, place art above inspiration, his saner estimate of its comparative value in no way prevented him from having a very keen sense of its absolute importance. Another of Hamilton's correspondents at this time was Mr. Aubrey de Vere, then a youth of eighteen ; and we have no hesitation in saying that, considering the age of their writer, his letters are among the most remarkable things of the kind in English literature, that on the subject of love (p. 528) being a specially extraordinary performance. Of Coleridge, also, we have one or two glimpses ; and, indeed, the last third of the volume is as full of literary as of personal and scientific interest. We have said only a word or two of the manner in which Mr. Graves has, so far, accomplished his biographical task ; but his modest self-effacement mast not tempt us to silence, or hinder us from paying a deserved tribute to the industry, the literary skill, and the power of emphasising every really characteristic feature, which are manifest in every page of this volume. The interest of the book is increased by an autotype from Mr. Farrell's miniature bust of Sir William Hamilton, and its value by a most admirable index, for which Mr. Graves expresses his thanks to a friend, to whom our gratitude also is due.