“And,” continued Kenelm, plunging deeper into the maze of metaphysical criticism, “even where the poet deals with persons and things close upon our daily sight—­if he would give them poetic charm he must resort to a sort of moral or psychological distance; the nearer they are to us in external circumstance, the farther they must be in some internal peculiarities.  Werter and Clarissa Harlowe are described as contemporaries of their artistic creation, and with the minutest details of an apparent realism; yet they are at once removed from our daily lives by their idiosyncrasies and their fates.  We know that while Werter and Clarissa are so near to us in much that we sympathize with them as friends and kinsfolk, they are yet as much remote from us in the poetic and idealized side of their natures as if they belonged to the age of Homer; and this it is that invests with charm the very pain which their fate inflicts on us.  Thus, I suppose, it must be in love.  If the love we feel is to have the glamor of poetry, it must be love for some one morally at a distance from our ordinary habitual selves; in short, differing from us in attributes which, however near we draw to the possessor, we can never approach, never blend, in attributes of our own; so that there is something in the loved one that always remains an ideal—­a mystery—­’a sun-bright summit mingling with the sky!’” ...

From this state, half comatose, half unconscious, Kenelm was roused slowly, reluctantly.  Something struck softly on his cheek—­again a little less softly; he opened his eyes—­they fell first upon two tiny rosebuds, which, on striking his face, had fallen on his breast; and then looking up, he saw before him, in an opening of the trellised circle, a female child’s laughing face.  Her hand was still uplifted, charged with another rosebud; but behind the child’s figure, looking over her shoulder and holding back the menacing arm, was a face as innocent but lovelier far—­the face of a girl in her first youth, framed round with the blossoms that festooned the trellis.  How the face became the flowers!  It seemed the fairy spirit of them.

Kenelm started and rose to his feet.  The child, the one whom he had so ungallantly escaped from, ran towards him through a wicket in the circle.  Her companion disappeared.

“Is it you?” said Kenelm to the child—­“you who pelted me so cruelly?  Ungrateful creature!  Did I not give you the best strawberries in the dish, and all my own cream?”

“But why did you run away and hide yourself when you ought to be dancing with me?” replied the young lady, evading, with the instinct of her sex, all answer to the reproach she had deserved.

“I did not run away; and it is clear that I did not mean to hide myself, since you so easily found me out.  But who was the young lady with you?  I suspect she pelted me too, for she seems to have run away to hide herself.”

“No, she did not pelt you; she wanted to stop me, and you would have had another rosebud—­oh, so much bigger!—­if she had not held back my arm.  Don’t you know her—­don’t you know Lily?”