Our parents, even to the end, partake too much of the nature of mythology; it always needs an effort to imagine them beings with quite the same needs and dreams as ourselves.  We rarely get a glimpse of their poetry, for the very reason that we ourselves are factors in it, and are, therefore, too apt to dwell on the less happy details of the domestic life, details which one ray of their poetry would transfigure as the sun transfigures the motes in his beam.  Thus, in that green age I spoke of, one’s sickly vision can but see the dusty, world-worn side of domesticity, the petty daily cares of living, the machinery, so to say, of ‘house and home.’  But when one stands in another home, where these are necessarily unseen by us, stands with the young husband, the poetry-maker, how different it all seems.  One sees the creation bloom upon it; one ceases to blaspheme, and learns to bless.  Later, when at length one understands why it is sweeter to say ‘wife’ than ‘sweetheart,’ how even one may be reconciled to calling one’s Daffodilia ’little mother’—­because of the children, you know; it would never do for them to say Daffodilia—­then he will understand too how those petty details, formerly so ‘banal,’ are, after all, but notes in the music, and what poetry can flicker, like its own blue flame, around even the joint purchase of a frying-pan.

That Narcissus ever understood this great old poetry he owes to George Muncaster.  In the very silence of his home one hears a singing—­’There lies the happiest land.’  It was one of his own quaint touches that the first night we found his nest, after the maid had given us admission, there should be no one to welcome us into the bright little parlour but a wee boy of four, standing in the doorway like a robin that has hopped on to one’s window-sill.  But with what a dear grace did the little chap hold out his hand and bid us good evening, and turn his little morsel of a bird’s tongue round our names; to be backed at once by a ring of laughter from the hidden ‘prompter’ thereupon revealed.  O happy, happy home! may God for ever smile upon you!  There should be a special grace for happy homes.  George’s set us ‘collecting’ such, with results undreamed of by youthful cynic.  Take courage, Reader, if haply you stand with hesitating toe above the fatal plunge.  Fear not, you can swim if you will.  Of course, you must take care that your joint poetry-maker be such a one as George’s.  One must not seem to forget the loving wife who made such dreaming as his possible.  He did not; and, indeed, had you told him of his happiness, he would but have turned to her with a smile that said, ‘All of thee, my love’; while, did one ask of this and that, how quickly ‘Yes! that was George’s idea,’ laughed along her lips.