Perhaps, silently underlying all these motives, I may at this time already have begun to entertain one other project which was not so much a motive as a hope—­not so much a hope as a half-seen possibility.  I had written verses from time to time all my life long, and of late they had come to me more abundantly than ever.  They flowed in upon me at times like an irresistible tide; at others they ebbed away for weeks, and seemed as if gone for ever.  It was a power over which I had no control, and sought to have none.  I never tried to make verses; but, when the inspiration was upon me, I made them, as it were, in spite of myself.  My desk was full of them in time—­sonnets, scraps of songs, fragments of blank verse, attempts in all sorts of queer and rugged metres—­hexameters, pentameters, alcaics, and the like; with, here and there, a dialogue out of an imaginary tragedy, or a translation from some Italian or German poet.  This taste grew by degrees, to be a rare and subtle pleasure to me.  My rhymes became my companions, and when the interval of stagnation came, I was restless and lonely till it passed away.

At length there came an hour (I was lying, I remember, on a ledge of turf on a mountain-side, overlooking one of the Italian valleys of the Alps), when I asked myself for the first time—­

“Am I also a poet?”

I had never dreamed of it, never thought of it, never even hoped it, till that moment.  I had scribbled on, idly, carelessly, out of what seemed a mere facile impulse, correcting nothing; seldom even reading what I had written, after it was committed to paper.  I had sometimes been pleased with a melodious cadence or a happy image—­sometimes amused with my own flow of thought and readiness of versification; but that I, simple Basil Arbuthnot, should be, after all, enriched with this splendid gift of song—­was it mad presumption, or were these things proof?  I knew not; but lying on the parched grass of the mountain-side, I tried the question over in my mind, this way and that, till “my heart beat in my brain,” How should I come at the truth?  How should I test whether this opening Paradise was indeed Eden, or only the mirage of my fancy—­mere sunshine upon sand?  We all write verses at some moment or other in our lives, even the most prosaic amongst us—­some because they are happy; some because they are sad; some because the living fire of youth impels them, and they must be up and doing, let the work be what it may.

     “Many fervent souls,
     Strike rhyme on rhyme, who would strike steel on steel,
     If steel had offer’d.”