It was in the operation of this method of inviting the mountain that the French poet, with a reference to whom we began this history, made his fantastic appearance in Zion Place.  It is to be feared that it was a conscious love of paradox that prompted an invitation from which indeed New Zion must derive the most mystical of benefits and the most imaginary of delights; but it was Theophil’s whim to crown the Renaissance in Coalchester by this reductio ad absurdum. The subtlest poetic art of France should come in person to Coalchester, and after days should tell that Theophilus Londonderry, while still a young country minister, had bidden Paris sing her loveliest siren-song in the musty little lecture-hall of New Zion.  It is thus power bends the bow of the world till the ends meet, and shoots the arrow of his name among the stars.

With the reawakening of his ambition, Theophil began to realise that his work at New Zion was nearing its end, and that before long he must seek that larger stage.  Yet all his heart remained in that dull little Zion Place, and while Jenny’s old mother lived he could not conceive tearing himself away.  Could he indeed even bring himself to say good-bye to these mean little romantic streets along which Jenny had tripped?  Could he bear to think of the commonplace little house which Jenny had transfigured to a shrine being desecrated with vulgar occupation?  If he could only raze it to the ground, as a cup from which a queen has drunk is shattered lest it should be soiled with usage of common lips!  Some day he might have grown rich enough to buy it, and set it apart for ever, as a little house sacred to love and youth; but, meanwhile, with what ugly and noisome presences would it have been defiled!

He would stand in Jenny’s room with its quiet books and flowers, and his heart would ache to think that some day harsh hands must noisily break in upon that sacred silence, and strip it of all its delicate memories.  Jenny’s room the lair of wild beasts, a nest of foulness and serpents!  Sometimes he was thus haunted with the ghosts of those who were to riot up and down these stairs when Jenny’s memory had quite died out of these walls like a fragrance of musk overborne with coarse odours.

Yes! in this perhaps are the rich most enviable of the poor, that they can afford chapels for their memories, and their houses, thus saved from external taint from generation to generation, become temples of which the very walls breathe nobleness, whereas the very birthplace of genius itself becomes a butcher’s shop; and though that genius be Shakespeare, and the old house be some day purified seventy times seven, and garnished as you please, the smell of slaughtered beasts will still cling about its rooms, and the butcher insist upon immortality too.

Jenny’s old mother was soon to turn into a memory also.  She had from time to time declared that she would not see another May, and had indeed on one occasion named the day on which she would die, with a curious precision, as though she had seen it written somewhere in a book, or learnt it from private or unimpeachable information.  Latterly she had met Jenny twice in full daylight on the stairs, and it was evident that the old woman would soon complete that little family circle in Paradise.