instances.  Coleridge lost the poetical gift altogether when he left his youth behind; Wordsworth wrote all his best poetry in a few early years; Milton lost his pure lyric gift.  But the most salient instance of all is Tennyson; in the two earliest volumes there is a perfectly novel charm, a grace, a daring which he lost in later life.  He became solemn, mannerised, conscious of responsibility.  Sometimes, as in some of the lyrics of Maud, he had a flash of the old spirit.  But compare the Idylls of the King, for all their dignity and lavish art, their sweet cadences, their mellifluous flow, with the early fragment in the same manner, the Morte d’Arthur, and you become aware that some exquisite haunted quality has slipped away from the later work which made the Morte d’Arthur one of the most perfect poems of the century.  The Morte d’Arthur is seen, the Idylls are laboriously imagined.  The Idylls, again, are full of an everyday morality—­the praise of civic virtues, the evolution of types—­and how tiresome they thus become! but in the Morte d’Arthur there is only a prophetic mysticism, which is all the more noble because it is so remote from common things.

With Browning it is the same in a certain degree; there is a charm about Pauline, for all its immaturity, which creates an irrepressible, uncalculating mood of undefined longing, utterly absent from his latest work.  Perhaps one of the most remarkable instances is that of Rossetti.  In the course of the House of Life, the dark curtain of the exotic mood, with its strange odours and glimpses, its fallen light, its fevered sense, is raised at intervals upon a sonnet of pure transparency and delicate sweetness, as though the weary, voluptuous soul, in its restless passage among perfumed chambers, looked out suddenly from a window upon some forest glade, full of cool winds and winter sunshine, and stood silent awhile.  These sonnets will always be found to be the earlier writings transplanted into the new setting.

I suppose it is to a certain extent a physical thing.  It is the shadow of experience, of familiarity, of weariness that creeps over the soul.  In youth the spirit expands like an opening rose, and things heard and seen strike upon the senses with an incredible novelty and freshness, hinting at all sorts of sweet surprises, joyful secrets, hopeful mysteries.  It is the subtle charm of youth that evaporates, the charm that makes a young and eager boy on the threshold of manhood so interesting, so delightful, even though he may be inarticulate and immature and self-absorbed.  Who does not remember friends of college days, graceful and winning creatures, lost in the sense of their own significance, who had nothing, it may be, particular to say, no great intellectual grip, no suggestiveness, yet moving about in a mysterious paradise of their own, full of dumb emotion, undefined longing, and with a deep sense of the romantic possibilities of