but they are dreaded enemies of his kind of dream, deadly enemies of the immaterial dreamers; and should one of them be taken on board a vessel of the vapourish texture young Woodseer sailed in above the clouds lightly while he was in it alone, questions of past, future, and present, the three weights upon humanity, bear it down, and she must go, or the vessel sinks.  And cast out of it, what was he?  The asking exposed him to the steadiest wind the civilized world is known to blow.  From merely thinking upon one of the daughters of earth, he was made to feel his position in that world, though he refused to understand it, and assisted by two days of hard walking he reduced Carinthia to an abstract enthusiasm, no very serious burden.  His note-book sustained it easily.  He wrote her name in simple fondness of the name; a verse, and hints for more, and some sentences, which he thought profound.  They were composed as he sat by the roadway, on the top of hills, and in a boat crossing a dark green lake deep under wooded mountain walls:  things of priceless value.

It happened, that midway on the lake he perceived his boatman about to prime a pistol to murder the mild-eyed stillness, and he called to the man in his best German to desist.  During the altercation, there passed a countryman of his in another of the punts, who said gravely:  ’I thank you for that.’  It was early morning, and they had the lake to themselves, each deeming the other an intruder; for the courtship of solitude wanes when we are haunted by a second person in pursuit of it; he is discolouring matter in our pure crystal cup.  Such is the worship of the picturesque; and it would appear to say, that the spirit of man finds itself yet in the society of barbarians.  The case admits of good pleading either way, even upon the issue whether the exclusive or the vulgar be the more barbarous.  But in those days the solicitation of the picturesque had been revived by a poet of some impassioned rhetoric, and two devotees could hardly meet, as the two met here, and not be mutually obscurants.

They stepped ashore in turn on the same small shoot of land where a farm-house near a chapel in the shadow of cliffs did occasional service for an inn.  Each had intended to pass a day and a night in this lonely dwelling-place by the lake, but a rival was less to be tolerated there than in love, and each awaited the other’s departure, with an air that said:  ‘You are in my sunlight’; and going deeper, more sternly:  ’Sir, you are an offence to Nature’s pudency!’

Woodseer was the more placable of the two; he had taken possession of the bench outside, and he had his note-book and much profundity to haul up with it while fish were frying.  His countryman had rushed inside to avoid him, and remained there pacing the chamber like a lion newly caged.  Their boatmen were brotherly in the anticipation of provision and payment.