summer, he resolved to go to Moleswich on foot. He had no need this time to encumber himsel

he found himself in one of the p

he hoary T

er-windi

the cool of the rippling waters, and listen to their placid murmurs amid the rushes in the bordering shallows. He had ample time before him. His rambles while at Cromwell Lodge had made him familiar with the district for miles round Moleswi

generations than that of Kenelm Chillingly were unborn, when every wave of the Rhine spoke of history and romance to me, what fairies should meet on thy ban

ive rhyme in song, dear to forefathers whose very names have become a poetry to us, thronged dimly and confusedly back to his memory, which had little cared to retain such gracefu

fatal powers of the fabled Cytherea; and with that love all the realisms of life became ideals, all the stern lines of our commonplace destinies undulated into curves of beauty, all the trite sounds of our every-day life attuned into delicacies o

belongs to the moments in which we transport ourselves into Elysium,

ng, si

ly si

d, with his

itter of N

nd him inquisitively with one paw raised, and sniffing, in some doubt whether he recognized an old acqua

n with his light tread and his cheery carol, but Kenelm rose to his feet, and hol

hilosopher, is

nd, honestly speaking, I am not the same. I, who spent that plea

the praise of a beefsteak. I, too, am not quite the sa

go through the

ay, and as I am in no hurry, I should not like to lose the opportunity chance has so happily given me of renewing acquaintance with one who has oft

was now neatly simple, the cool and quiet summer dress any English gentleman might adopt in a long rural walk. And as he uncovered his head to court the cooling breeze, there was a graver dignity in the man's handsome Rubens-like face, a line of more concentrated thought in the spacious forehead, a thread or two of gray shimmering here and there through the thick auburn curls of ha

d-side fountain, I advised you to do like me, seek amusement and adventure as a foot-traveller. Now, seeing you, evidently a gentleman by education and birth, still

so," replied Ken

ion?-army, la

N

o a petticoat indeed has at last found its charm for you i

of that playful taunt, "I conclude from your remark t

from many errors, and been many years nearer to the goal w

hat goal,-

which allows of

w said-you still mean to go throug

the love of verse-making is! How rarely a man of good sense deceives himself as to other things for which he is fitted, in which he can succeed; but let him once drink into his being the charm of verse-making, how the glamour of the charm bewitches his understanding! how long it is before he can believe that the world will not t

soul. But then Kenelm was a mortal so eccentric that, if a single acute suffering endured by a fellow mortal could be brought before the evidence of his senses, I doubt whether he would not have suffered as much as that fellow-mort

y were verse-makers. Cardinal Richelieu was a verse-maker; Walter Raleigh and Philip Sidney, Fox, Burke, Sheridan, Warren Hastings, Canning, even the grave William Pitt,-all were verse-makers. Verse-making did not retard-no doubt the qualities essential to verse-making accel

mighty painters w

of a distant mountain, in the lengthening shadows which yon sunset casts on the waters at our feet, in the habits of the thrush dropped fearlessly close beside me, in that turf moistened by its neighbourhood to those dripping rushes, all of which I could describe no less accurately than you,-as a Peter Bell might describe them no less accurately than a William Wordsworth. But in such songs of yours as you have permitted me to hear, you seem to have escaped out of that elementary accidence of the poet's art, and to touch, no matter how slightly, on the only lasting interest which the universal heart of man can have in t

turned his bright countenance, no longer dimmed by a cloud, to

in the fashion of the present day. I wish you would

specimen of your own verses, not in the fashion of the present d

ree

Suppose I am writing for a prize-medal in English, as I wrote at college for a prize-medal in Latin: of course, I shall be successful in proport

, are,-first, a selection of such verbal elegances as would have been most repulsive to the barbaric taste of the preceding century; and, secondly, a very lofty dis

ed, I will only ask yo

very much in fa

ot going so to free your experime

d Kenelm, yawning; "rhyme

rfection by our modern poets, I think the best adapted to dainty leav

maker labels his poem, his genius, like Pindar's, disdains to be cramped by th

but emphatic sing

he gentle Py

s, and passing

th nor riches

rk-eyed Sophr

summer day, wh

lowly, and th

issus, to thy

id 'I love the

s, when they h

eads in glee:

ltars: and th

thed. Such is th

story do ye

ublish it in

itics, my good f

cer. Take thei

but not read,-or

ughing; "and if this be the Augustan age, and the English

yourself dash off at a sitting a volume or so in the same style; disguising completely the verbal elegances borrowed, adding to the delicacies of the rhyme by the frequent introduction of a line

el, with an angry flush on his cheek a

ltivating the acquaintance of reviewers. In the Augustan age criticism is cliquism. Belong to a clique and you are Horace or Tibullus. Belong to no clique and, of course, you are Bavius or Maevius. 'The Londoner' is the enemy of no man: it hol

gnorance of the rules which govern so-called organs of opinion, had hoped, in my time of struggle, for a little sympathy, a kindly encouragement, have combined to crush me down. They suc

ble to exclude his steps, was he, then, now pursuing,-he whom Kenelm had assumed to belong to some commercial moneymaking firm? No doubt some less difficult prose-track, probably a novel. Everybody writes novels nowadays, a

idence on that score. His mind at that moment, not unnatu

le down into the peace of home. A peaceful home is like a good conscience. The rains without do not pierce its roof, the w

very

ways lo

like many vagrants from the beaten high roads of the world, there is in my nature something of that lawlessness which belongs to high animal spirits, to the zest of adventure, and the warm blood that runs into song, chiefly beca

, I presume," inter

hich I intrust my fortunes, all that would have rendered me unworthy of the pure love that now, I trust, awaits and crowns my dreams of happiness, I have b

Lusc

when the conscience, though lulled asleep for a moment, is still asleep so lightly that the sigh of a breeze, the fall of a leaf, can awake it with a start of terror, I took the voice for that of my guardian angel. Thinking it

impertinence:

Kenelm's hand and

agabond within me was killed. I mean not, indeed, the love of Nature and of song which had first allured the vagabond, but the hatred of steadfast habits and of serious work,-/that/ was killed. I no longer trifled with my calling: I took to it as a serious duty. And when I saw her, whom fate has reserved and reared for my bride, her face was no long

-possession,-not unwilling to be silent,-not unwilling, in the softness of the hour, passing fro

he minstrel resumed l

ng by our former conversation you cannot have l

did not deem it necessary to enter into any details on the subject

ay be slow and gradual; it may be quick and sudden. But in the morning, when we wake and recognize a change in the world w

he has known the beloved one, so it is almost as idle to ask if she be not beauti

he maiden specimen of my verse-making on condition that you repaid me by a specimen of yo

beef

st be of love, and if you could improvise a stanza or two expressive of

hat in unison with the thought you ask me to versify, but which you would not stay to hear at Tor Hadham (though you did drop

HE MISTRESS IS I

pretty, my

r yet call

lineaments f

nswer you p

eve that the

self as she

teals from her

vealed on this

this very artless ditty,

y lies through those meadows, and

a lodging not far from hence, to which the p

llow-traveller all confidence as to his own name and attributes, he had no right to ask any confidence from that gentleman not voluntarily ma

s. In this case garrulous and somewhat vaunting with the one man, warm-coloured, sensuous, impressionable to the influences of external Nature, as an Aeolian harp to the rise or fall of a passing wind; and, with the other man, taciturn and somewhat modestly expressed, saturni

terance, in the frank play of its delivery, that I could no more adequately describe it than a reporter, however faithful to

ushed on to dwell upon the struggles for a livelihood for himself and those dependent on him; how in such struggles he was compelled to divert toil and energy from the systematic pursuit of the object he had once set before him; the necessities for money were too urgent to be postponed to the visions of fame. "But even," he exclaimed, passionately, "even in such hasty and crude manifestations of what is within me, as circumstances limited my powers, I know that I ought to have found from those who profess to be authoritative judges the encouragement of praise. How much better, then, I should have done if I had found it! How a little praise warms out of a man the good that is in him, and the sneer of a contempt which

tle while ago that fam

ourselves to ascend; but fame remains on the earth, which we shall never again revisit. And it is because fame is earth-born that the desire for i

rrived at the brook, facing the w

ould make ourselves known to each other by name? I have no longer any cause to conceal mine, indeed I neve

the Flower-ball,' one of three pictures very severely handled by 'The Londoner,' but, in spite of that potent enemy, insuring fortune and promising fame to the wandering minstrel, whose name, if the sight of the pictures had induced you to inquire into that, you would have found to be Walter Melville. Next January I hope, thanks to that picture, to add, 'Associate of the Royal Academy.' Th