Was this case mine?  Was I fancying myself a poet, only because I was an idle man, and had lost the woman I loved?  To answer these questions myself was impossible.  They could only be answered by the public voice, and before I dared question that oracle I had much to do.  I resolved to discipline myself to the harness of rhythm.  I resolved to go back to the fathers of poetry—­to graduate once again in Homer and Dante, Chaucer and Shakespeare.  I promised myself that, before I tried my wings in the sun, I would be my own severest critic.  Nay, more—­that I would never try them so long as it seemed possible a fall might come of it.  Once come to this determination, I felt happier and more hopeful than I had felt for the last three years.  I looked across the blue mists of the valley below, and up to the aerial peaks which rose, faint, and far, and glittering—­mountain beyond mountain, range above range, as if painted on the thin, transparent air—­and it seemed to me that they stood by, steadfast and silent, the witnesses of my resolve.

“I will be strong,” I said.  “I will be an idler and a dreamer no longer.  Books have been my world.  I have taken all, and given nothing.  Now I too will work, and work to prove that I was not unworthy of her love.”

Going down, by-and-by, into the valley as the shadows were lengthening, I met a traveller with an open book in his hand.  He was an Englishman—­small, sallow, wiry, and wore a gray, loose coat, with two large pockets full of books.  I had met him once before at Milan, and again in a steamer on Lago Maggiore.  He was always reading.  He read in the diligence—­he read when he was walking—­he read all through dinner at the tables-d’-hote.  He had a mania for reading; and, might, in fact, be said to be bound up in his own library.

Meeting thus on the mountain, we fell into conversation.  He told me that he was on his way to Geneva, that he detested continental life, and that he was only waiting the arrival of certain letters before starting for England.

“But,” said I, “you do not, perhaps, give continental life a trial.  You are always absorbed in the pages of a book; and, as for the scenery, you appear not to observe it.”

“Deuce take the scenery!” he exclaimed, pettishly.  “I never look at it.  All scenery’s alike.  Trees, mountains, water—­water, mountains, trees; the same thing over and over again, like the bits of colored glass in a kaleidoscope.  I read about the scenery, and that is quite enough for me.”

“But no book can paint an Italian lake or an Alpine sunset; and when one is on the spot....”

“I beg your pardon,” interrupted the traveller in gray.  “Everything is much pleasanter and more picturesque in books than in reality—­travelling especially.  There are no bad smells in books.  There are no long bills in books.  Above all, there are no mosquitoes.  Travelling is the greatest mistake in the world, and I am going home as fast as I can.”