“Is she also thus changed and faded?” I asked myself, as I turned away.  And then I sighed to think that if we met she might not know me.

For I loved her still; worshipped her; raised altars to her in the dusky chambers of my memory.  My whole life was dedicated to her.  My best thoughts were hers.  My poems, my ambition, my hours of labor, all were hers only!  I knew now that no time could change the love which had so changed me, or dim the sweet remembrance of that face which I carried for ever at my heart like an amulet.  Other women might be fair, but my eyes never sought them; other voices might be sweet, but my ear never listened to them; other hands might be soft, but my lips never pressed them.  She was the only woman in all my world—­the only star in all my night—­the one Eve of my ruined Paradise.  In a word, I loved her—­loved her, I think, more dearly than before I lost her.

     “Love is not love
     Which alters when it alteration finds,
     Or bends with the remover to remove: 
     O no! it is an ever-fixed mark,
     That looks on tempests and is never shaken.”

I had that morning received by post a parcel of London papers and magazines, which, for a foolish reason of my own, I almost dreaded to open; so, putting off the evil hour, I thrust the ominous parcel into my pocket and went out to read it in some green solitude, far away among the lonely hills and tracts of furzy common that extend for miles and miles around my native place.  It was a delicious autumn morning, bright and fresh and joyous as spring.  The purple heather was all abloom along the slopes of the hill-sides.  The golden sandcliffs glittered in the sun.  The great firwoods reached away over heights and through valleys—­“grand and spiritual trees,” pointing ever upward with warning finger, like the Apostles in the old Italian pictures.  Now I passed a solitary farm-yard where busy laborers were piling the latest stacks; now met a group of happy children gathering wild nuts and blackberries.  By-and-by, I came upon a great common, with a picturesque mill standing high against the sky.  All around and about stretched a vast prospect of woodland and tufted heath, bounded far off by a range of chalk-hills speckled with farm-houses and villages, and melting towards the west into a distance faint and far, and mystic as the horizon of a Turner.

Here I threw myself on the green turf and rested.  Truly, Nature is a great “physician of souls.”  The peace of the place descended into my heart, and hushed for a while the voice of its repinings.  The delicious air, the living silence of the woods, the dreamy influences of the autumnal sunshine, all alike served to lull me into a pleasant mood, neither gay nor sad, but very calm—­calm enough for the purpose for which I had come.  So I brought out my packet of papers, summoned all my philosophy to my aid, and met my own name upon the second page.  For here was, as I had anticipated, a critique on my first volume of poems.