His dreams were on a grand scale; such, after all, are the best possessions of youth.  Had he but been free, or mated with a nature akin to his own, he would have felt himself as truly the heir of creation as any young man that lived.  But his lot was cast, and his youth had all the serious aspect to himself of thoughtful manhood.  In the region of his art alone he hoped always to find freedom and a companionship which his home life could never give him.

Clement meant to have visited his beloved before he left Alderbank, but was called unexpectedly back to the city.  Happily Susan was not exacting; she looked up to him with too great a feeling of distance between them to dare to question his actions.  Perhaps she found a partial consolation in the company of Mr. Gifted Hopkins, who tried his new poems on her, which was the next best thing to addressing them to her.  “Would that you were with us at this delightful season,” she wrote in the autumn; “but no, your Susan must not repine.  Yet, in the beautiful words of our native poet,

     “Oh would, oh would that thou wast here,
     For absence makes thee doubly dear;
     Ah! what is life while thou ’rt away? 
     ‘T is night without the orb of day!’”

The poet referred to, it need hardly be said, was our young and promising friend G. H., as he sometimes modestly signed himself.  The letter, it is unnecessary to state, was voluminous,—­for a woman can tell her love, or other matter of interest, over and over again in as many forms as another poet, not G. H., found for his grief in ringing the musical changes of “In Memoriam.”

The answers to Susan’s letters were kind, but not very long.  They convinced her that it was a simple impossibility that Clement could come to Oxbow Village, on account of the great pressure of the work he had to keep him in the city, and the plans he must finish at any rate.  But at last the work was partially got rid of, and Clement was coming; yes, it was so nice, and, oh dear! should n’t she be real happy to see him?

To Susan he appeared as a kind of divinity, almost too grand for human nature’s daily food.  Yet, if the simple-hearted girl could have told herself the whole truth in plain words, she would have confessed to certain doubts which from time to time, and oftener of late, cast a shadow on her seemingly bright future.  With all the pleasure that the thought of meeting Clement gave her, she felt a little tremor, a certain degree of awe, in contemplating his visit.  If she could have clothed her self-humiliation in the gold and purple of the “Portuguese Sonnets,” it would have been another matter; but the trouble with the most common sources of disquiet is that they have no wardrobe of flaming phraseology to air themselves in; the inward burning goes on without the relief and gratifying display of the crater.