’His mind should be approached close by one who needs its fragrance.  All with him leads rather to glimpses and insights, than to broad, comprehensive views.  Till he needs the public, the public does not need him.  The lonely lamp, the niche, the dark cathedral grove, befit him best.  Let him shroud himself in the symbols of his native ritual, till he can issue forth on the wings of song.’

She was at this time, too, much drawn also to a man of poetic sensibility, and of much reading,—­which he took the greatest pains to conceal,—­studious of the art of poetry, but still more a poet in his conversation than in his poems,—­who attracted Margaret by the flowing humor with which he filled the present hour, and the prodigality with which he forgot all the past.

‘Unequal and uncertain,’ she says, ’but in his good moods, of the best for a companion, absolutely abandoned to the revelations of the moment, without distrust or check of any kind, unlimited and delicate, abundant in thought, and free of motion, he enriches life, and fills the hour.’

’I wish I could retain ——­’s talk last night.  It was wonderful; it was about all the past experiences frozen down in the soul, and the impossibility of being penetrated by anything.  “Had I met you,” said he, “when I was young!—­but now nothing can penetrate.”  Absurd as was what he said, on one side, it was the finest poetic-inspiration on the other, painting the cruel process of life, except where genius continually burns over the stubble fields.

“Life,” he said, “is continually eating us up.”  He said, “Mr. E. is quite wrong about books.  He wants them all good; now I want many bad.  Literature is not merely a collection of gems, but a great system of interpretation.”  He railed at me as artificial.  “It don’t strike me when you are alone with me,” he says; “but it does when others are present.  You don’t follow out the fancy of the moment; you converse; you have treasured thoughts to tell; you are disciplined,—­artificial.”  I pleaded guilty, and observed that I supposed that it must be so with one of any continuity of thought, or earnestness of character.  “As to that,” says he, “I shall not like you the better for your excellence.  I don’t know what is the matter.  I feel strongly attracted towards you; but there is a drawback in my mind,—­I don’t know exactly what.  You will always be wanting to grow forward; now I like to grow backward, too.  You are too ideal.  Ideal people anticipate their lives; and they make themselves and everybody around them restless, by always being beforehand with themselves.”

’I listened attentively; for what he said was excellent.  Following up the humor of the moment, he arrests admirable thoughts on the wing.  But I cannot but see, that what they say of my or other obscure lives is true of every prophetic, of every tragic character.  And then I like to have them make me look on that