Helen and Beatrice, Perdita and Una, and the interest to me would have been only their privilege of sharing her sex, and reflecting so much of her excellences as allowed me to recognize how far she exceeded them. That antagonism I have noticed between Absence and Presence, the with her and the without her, extended its subtle contrast through every moment of the day; through all the particulars of life. Désirée, and Not Désirée, were truly more to me than the Not I' and the I' to the Idealist Philosopher. To listen for the arrival of the noble child, to think myself, as it were, into her thoughts, to call on Heaven to sever the too strictly inseparable bond between Flesh and Spirit and take me to the desired presence, to put on and cast myself upon the wings 'of thought' thither with such intensity of longing, that my own soul must, I fancied, have been with her, as we read of the second sight, in actual vision:- not for days, but years, these were my follies perhaps, but follies beyond the world's choicest wisdom. Often I gave her books, not so much for the gift's sake, as that I might give myself beforehand the physical pleasure of writing Désirée's name on the title-page. Treasures of art or wonders of science appeared now unlovely sources of bare instruction, not of enjoyment: the light that never was on sea or land' often extinguished the splendour of lake and mountain. Even on distant journeys, whilst delighting in the spectacle, I found a secret irony of further delight in the simple remembrance of her dearness. To see the glory and the gloom of Florence, the pomp and pathos of Rome, Alps and Apennines, Aegaean and Adriatic, these men counted amongst the golden hours, the choice circumstances of life-but God had blessed me with loftier privileges in an English nursery.

XII Thus the period of my school-life passed away: amidst the fitful earnestness of boyish study, with its hours of laborious despair and trances of the first delight in Beauty and Greatness: amidst the emulous animation of boyish games, the weeks of happiness by seaside or river, the wild pulsation and tumult of coming life, the laughter of friends, the peace of home, the reveries of passion. Meanwhile, to match the enlargement of years, the inward service' of the mind had in some degree grown wider, and that childly love, a trifle and unworthy record even in memory, if evanescent with childhood, had passed also from a simple, unreflecting, all-satisfying Delight into some consciousness of hope and fear, something of manlier aim, if not to definite plan, or spoken words, or such confessions as were whispered across the balcony of Verona. I had been a child

that thought there was no more behind But such a day to-morrow as to-day,

And to be boy eternal.

But now the relations of individual desire to the circumstances of life; the relations of my individual life to kindred, friends, neighbours, the world without; the larger relations, lastly, of our own age to the many centuries preceding, and, even more imaginatively impressive, our yet hidden and unrealized partnership in futurity,-all these began dimly to unfold themselves. And as in such lessons something is learned from actual life, but more, during the limited experiences of boyhood, from books and the thoughts they suggest, a few words on the writings which most affected my mind will be excused, let me anticipate, by the friend or two for whom I write, and the unknown friends by sympathy for whom I hope I am writing. At least I ask their pardon if, once or twice, I

indulge the egotism of tracing the successive gradations of delight or instruction through which the master-spirits of the world led me; if I turn from the image of Désirée to the inward efforts to make myself more worthy her; if (and by quotation also I shall take the license)

Intesso fregi al ver, s' adorno in parte

D'altri diletti che de' tuoi, le carte.

XIII Without reference to the journal, written when each day was golden and appeared to deserve an immediate commemoration, I could not retraverse the exact steps of this progress. But the oldest leaves, like the Annals of the Pontifex of Rome in brevity and want of colour, give only the titles of the books read; I must supply from memory what comparative value and pleasure I gained in the reading. Dante and Shakspeare are first and most recurrent in that chronicle. Then during the earlier holidays, I find efforts to master Sophocles and Juvenal; efforts mainly of freewill, and hence likelier to teach appreciation of these books than the fated taskwork of school, in which, as other boys, I could not at first separate the pleasure of learning from the sensation that I was compelled to learn. But the ponderous sentences and emphatic one-sidedness of the Satirist affected me then far more than the large wisdom of the Poet, his crystal tranquillity, his modest grace and refined passion. He was too remote from our thoughts and ways the love of his heroic world, not mine; too sensual at once, and too little earthly. Sympathizing rather after my own measure with Dante, I could not worship that beauty in Antigone which had touched me to the life in Beatrice,―the golden-haired Christian child who had walked the actual streets of Florence, while the passers-by cried Miracle', and her young lover fainted

C

beneath the fire and blessedness of passion. Thus, unable to master the severe idea of Sophoclean art, unable to find an echo to my own heart's language in the silver flow of anapaest and iambic, the calm words which conceal such intensity of feeling, I should have presumptuously misesteemed this great Poet, if the strong testimony of centuries had not warned me that one reward of maturer years might be initiation into his mysteries: and for the narrative of those years I reserve some notice of that or of analogous experiences.

XIV Scott and Shakspeare were read to me, even more than by me, so early that the thought of these writers hardly suggested books; they were living presences. As the pages were opened, and a dear voice, long silent or unheard, unfolded the incidents of Waverley' or of the 'Tempest', a something, to my youthful fancy, seemed to have entered the room; whilst pursuing our common tasks, we were yet breathing a new atmosphere. Each immortal work called up its own colour and tone of feelings, a world peopled with peculiar shapes; I became part of what I listened to. A local habitation, an individual landscape attached itself to every romance or poem; a background before which the actors seemed invariably moving. Long before visiting them, I had a Scotland and a Venice of my own; a fairy island and a grove for Ferdinand and Miranda beyond the research of travellers. I have seen the palaces that edge the Brenta since, or star the green slopes of Mosolente, but no Belmont was there; I have seen Verona, but not the balcony of Juliet, . . . And, opening now Scott or Shakspeare, this old child's vision haunts me yet; the actual scenes never occur; I am still moving about in worlds never to be realized.

Every picture in the magical series then gave equal pleasure in itself; but 'Ivanhoe' allowed me, I remember, the special delight of identifying the fair heroine with at least the outward features of Désirée. This was exceptional; yet throughout this region Désirée was spiritually present. It was not that in such moments I thought of her consciously, heard her voice in every song, or saw her countenance in Lucy or Beatrice or Imogen. To the quickly ranging mind of boyhood, eager for the story, or absorbed in the verse, such unceasing immanence of passion is perhaps impossible; I, at least, cannot claim it. But Love, I may truly say, had lent the light in which Genius now appeared before me; strengthened the soul to grasp the manlier forms and 'certain step' of Heroism, or planted eyes of recognition for the footprints of Beauty. Deep passion gives the mind depth, or seems to give: we see not only further into the soul of things, but refer every circumstance and incident to a hidden unity, to a larger law. The whole world seems to radiate from our own heart's mistress; she is the true point of the converging forces of Nature; the unknown and stellar centre of the universe.

Why should philosophers inquire further? Désirée, I could have said, is what you seek.-Love, subordinating the many to the one, teaches us science before we are aware; we have entered without knowing it on a new life, and feel that we are less children than we thought ourselves.

XV Thus she whose image distracted my thoughts from study, first animated me to study with thought. But this advance was gradual and tardy. In the reading hitherto mentioned, the story for itself had been my main interest that was indeed secretly sustained by the writer's essential gifts, but I could not as yet separate these