every-day objects and circumstances, a certain ecstatic quality in the simplest experiences; but even so far as it had been revealed, this dawning vision of the world seemed only to have come to him, not so much to find expression, as to mock him with his childish incapacity adequately to use the very tools he loved.  He would hang for hours over some scene in nature, caught in a woodland spell, like a nympholept of old; but when he tried to put in words what he had seen, what a poor piece of ornamental gardening the thing was!  There were trees and birds and grass, to be sure; but there was nothing of that meaning look which they had worn, that look of being tiptoe with revelation which is one of the most fascinating tricks of the visible world, and which even a harsh town full of chimneys can sometimes take on when seen in given moments and lights.  And it was astonishing to see into what lifeless imitative verse his most original and passionate moments could be transformed.

Still some unreasonably indulgent spirit of the air, that had evidently not read his manuscripts, whispered him to be of good cheer:  the lifeless words would not always be lifeless, some day the birds would sing in his verses too.  This sense of failure did not, it must be said, immediately follow composition; for, for a little while the original expression of the thing seen reinforced with reflected significance its pale copy.  It was only some weeks after, when the written copy was left to do all the work itself, that its foolish inadequacy was exposed.

“However, there is one consolation, they are not worse than Keats and Shelley wrote at the same age,” he said to himself, as he looked through a bundle of the poor things the evening before his room was to be dismantled.  “Indeed, they couldn’t be,” he added, with a smile.  Fortunately he was but nineteen as yet; would he venture on a like comparison were he twenty-five?

Yes, his little room was to be dismantled on the morrow,—­this first little private chapel of his spirit.  This fair order of shelves, this external harmony answering to an inner harmony of his spirit, were to be broken up for ever.  Often as he had sat in the folioed lamplit nook which was, as it were, the very chancel of the little church, and gazed in an ecstasy at the books, each with a great shining name of fame upon its cover, it had seemed as though he had put his very soul outside him, externalised it in this little corner of books and pictures.  His soul shivered, as one who must go houseless awhile, at the thought that to-morrow its home would be no more.  When and how would be its reincarnation?  More magnificent, maybe, but never this again.  It was sacrilege,—­was it not ingratitude too?  When once more the books and the pictures began to form into a new harmony, there would be no mother’s love to help the work go on....