after all, is the main matter.  It is sweet, doubtless, to be one of those same mushroom-men, sweet to be placarded as ‘the new’ this or that, to step for a day into the triumphal car of newspaper renown, drawn by teams of willing paragraph-men—­who, does it never strike you? are but doing it all for hire, and earning their bread by their bent necks.  Yet for those to whom it is denied there is solid comfort; for it is not fame, and, worse still, it is not life, ’tis but to be ‘a Bourbon in a crown of straws.’

If one could only take poor foolish Cockneydom right away outside this poor vainglorious city, and show them how the stars are smiling to themselves above it, nudging each other, so to say, at the silly lights that ape their shining—­for such a little while!

Yes, that is one danger of the poet in London, that he should come to think himself ‘somebody’; though, doubtless, in proportion as he is a poet, the other danger will be the greater, that he should deem himself ‘nobody.’  Modest by nature, credulous of appearances, the noisy pretensions of the hundred and one small celebrities, and the din of their retainers this side and that, in comparison with his own unattended course, what wonder if his heart sinks and he gives up the game; how shall his little pipe, though it be of silver, hope to be heard in this land of bassoons?  To take London seriously is death both to man and artist.  Narcissus had sufficient success there to make this a temptation, and he fell.  He lost his hold of the great things of life, he forgot the stars, he forgot his love, and what wonder that his art sickened also.  For a few months life was but a feverish clutch after varied sensation, especially the dear tickle of applause; he caught the facile atheistic flippancy of that poor creature, the ’modern young man,’ all-knowing and all-foolish, and he came very near losing his soul in the nightmare.  But he had too much ballast in him to go quite under, and at last strength came, and he shook the weakness from him.  Yet the fall had been too far and too cruel for him to be happy again soon.  He had gone forth so confident in his new strength of manly love; and to fall so, and almost without an effort!  Who has not called upon the mountains to cover him in such an hour of awakening, and who will wonder that Narcissus dared not look upon the face of Hesper till solitude had washed him clean, and bathed him in its healing oil?  I alone bade him good-bye.  It was in this room wherein I am writing, the study we had taken together, where still his books look down at me from the shelves, and all the memorials of his young life remain.  O can it have been but ‘a phantom of false morning’?  A Milton snatched up at the last moment was the one book he took with him.