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Father and Son

<h5 id="id00234">CHAPTER VII</h5> IN the history of an infancy so cloistered and uniform as mine, such a real adventure as my being publicly and successfully kidnapped cannot be overlooked. There were several 'innocents' in our village—harmless eccentrics who had more or less unquestionably crossed the barrier which divides the sane from the insane. They were not discouraged by public opinion; indeed, several of them were favoured beings, suspected by my Father of exaggerating their mental density in order to escape having to work, like dogs, who, as we all know, could speak as well as we do, were they not afraid of being made to fetch and carry. Miss Mary Flaw was not one of these imbeciles. She was what the French call a detraquee; she had enjoyed good intelligence and an active mind, but her wits had left the rails and were careening about the country. Miss Flaw was the daughter of a retired Baptist minister, and she lived, with I remember not what relations, in a little solitary house high up at Barton Cross, whither Mary Grace and I would sometimes struggle when our pastoral duties were over. In later years, when I met with those celebrated verses in which the philosopher expresses the hope In the downhill of life, when I find I'm declining, May my lot no less fortunate be Than a snug elbow-chair can afford for reclining, And a cot that o'erlooks the wide sea my thoughts returned instinctively, and they still return, to the high abode of Miss Flaw. There was a porch at her door, both for shelter and shade, and it was covered with jasmine; but the charm of the place was a summer-house close by, containing a table, encrusted with cowry-shells, and seats from which one saw the distant waters of the bay. At the entrance to this grotto there was always set a 'snug elbow-chair', destined, I suppose, for the Rev. Mr. Flaw, or else left there in pious memory of him, since I cannot recollect whether he was alive or dead. I delighted in these visits to Mary Flaw. She always received us with effusion, tripping forward to meet us, and leading us, each by a hand held high, with a dancing movement which I thought infinitely graceful, to the cowry-shell bower, where she would regale us with Devonshire cream and with small hard biscuits that were like pebbles. The conversation of Mary Flaw was a great treat to me. I enjoyed its irregularities, its waywardness; it was like a tune that wandered into several keys. As Mary Grace Burmington put it, one never knew what dear Mary Flaw would say next, and that she did not herself know added to the charm. She had become crazed, poor thing, in consequence of a disappointment in love, but of course I did not know that, nor that she was crazed at all. I thought her brilliant and original, and I liked her very much. In the light of coming events, it would be affectation were I to pretend that she did not feel a similar partiality for me. Miss Flaw was, from the first, devoted to my Father's ministrations, and it was part of our odd village indulgence that no one ever dreamed of preventing her from coming to the Room. On Sunday evenings the bulk of the audience was arranged on forms, with backs to them, set in the middle of the floor, with a passage round them, while other forms were placed against the walls. My Father preached from a lectern, facing the audience. If darkness came on in the course of the service, Richard Moxhay, glimmering in his cream-white corduroys, used to go slowly around, lighting groups of tallow candles by the help of a box of lucifers. Mary Flaw always assumed the place of honour, on the left extremity of the front bench, immediately opposite my Father. Miss Marks and Mary Grace, with me ensconced and almost buried between them, occupied the right of the same bench. While the lighting proceeded, Miss Flaw used to direct it from her seat, silently, by pointing out to Moxhay, who took no notice, what groups of candles he should light next. She did this just as the clown in the circus directs the grooms how to move the furniture, and Moxhay paid no more attention to her than the grooms do to the clown. Miss Flaw had another peculiarity: she silently went through a service exactly similar to ours, but much briefer. The course of our evening service was this: My Father prayed, and we all knelt down; then he gave out a hymn and most of us stood up to sing; then he preached for about an hour, while we sat and listened; then a hymn again; then prayer and the valediction. Mary Flaw went through this ritual, but on a smaller scale. We all knelt down together, but when we rose from our knees, Miss Flaw was already standing up, and was pretending, without a sound, to sing a hymn; in the midst of our hymn, she sat down, opened her Bible, found a text, and then leaned back, her eyes fixed in space, listening to an imaginary sermon which our own real one soon caught up, and coincided with for about three- quarters of an hour. Then, while our sermon went peacefully on, Miss Flaw would rise, and sing in silence (if I am permitted to use such an expression) her own visionary hymn; then she would kneel down and pray, then rise, collect her belongings, and sweep, in fairy majesty, out of the chapel, my Father still rounding his periods from the pulpit. Nobody ever thought of preventing these movements, or of checking the poor creature in her innocent flightiness, until the evening of the great event. It was all my own fault. Mary Flaw had finished her imaginary service earlier than usual. She had stood up alone with her hymn- book before her; she had flung herself on her knees alone, in the attitude of devotion; she had risen; she had seated herself for a moment to put on her gloves, and to collect her Bible, her hymn- book and her pocket-handkerchief in her reticule. She was ready to start, and she looked around her with a pleasant air; my Father, all undisturbed, booming away meanwhile over our heads. I know not why the manoeuvres of Miss Flaw especially attracted me that evening, but I leaned out across Miss Marks and I caught Miss Flaw's eye. She nodded, I nodded; and the amazing deed was done, I hardly know how. Miss Flaw, with incredible swiftness, flew along the line, plucked me by the coat-collar from between my paralysed protectresses, darted with me down the chapel and out into the dark, before anyone had time to say 'Jack Robinson'. My Father gazed from the pulpit and the stream of exhortation withered on his lips. No one in the body of the audience stirred; no one but himself had clearly seen what had happened. Vague rows of 'saints' with gaping countenances stared up at him, while he shouted, 'Will nobody stop them? as we whisked out through the doorway. Forth into the moist night we went, and up the lampless village, where, a few minutes later, the swiftest of the congregation, with my Father at their head, found us sitting on the doorstep of the butcher's shop. My captor was now quite quiet, and made no objection to my quitting her,—'without a single kiss or a goodbye', as the poet says. Although I had scarcely felt frightened at the time, doubtless my nerves were shaken by this escapade, and it may have had something to do with the recurrence of the distressing visions from which I had suffered as a very little child. These came back, with a force and expansion due to my increased maturity. I had hardly laid my head down on the pillow, than, as it seemed to me, I was taking part in a mad gallop through space. Some force, which had tight hold of me, so that I felt myself an atom in its grasp, was hurrying me on over an endless slender bridge, under which on either side a loud torrent rushed at a vertiginous depth below. At first our helpless flight,—for I was bound hand and foot like Mazeppa,—proceeded in a straight line, but presently it began to curve, and we raced and roared along, in what gradually became a monstrous vortex, reverberant with noises, loud with light, while, as we proceeded, enormous concentric circles engulfed us, and wheeled above and about us. It seemed as if we,—I, that is, and the undefined force which carried me,— were pushing feverishly on towards a goal which our whole concentrated energies were bent on reaching, but which a frenzied despair in my heart told me we never could reach, yet the attainment of which alone could save us from destruction. Far away, in the pulsation of the great luminous whorls, I could just see that goal, a ruby-coloured point waxing and waning, and it bore, or to be exact it consisted of the letters of the word CARMINE. This agitating vision recurred night after night, and filled me with inexpressible distress. The details of it altered very little, and I knew what I had to expect when I crept into bed. I knew that for a few minutes I should be battling with the chill of the linen sheets, and trying to keep awake, but that then, without a pause, I should slip into that terrible realm of storm and stress in which I was bound hand and foot, and sent galloping through infinity. Often have I wakened, with unutterable joy, to find my Father and Miss Marks, whom my screams had disturbed, standing one on each side of my bed. They could release me from my nightmare, which seldom assailed me twice a night—but how to preserve me from its original attack passed their understanding. My Father, in his tenderness, thought to exorcize the demon by prayer. He would appear in the bedroom, just as I was first slipping into bed, and he would kneel at my side. The light from a candle on the mantel-shelf streamed down upon his dark head of hair while his face was buried in the coverlid, from which a loud voice came up, a little muffled, begging that I might be preserved against all the evil spirits that walk in darkness and that the deep might not swallow me up. This little ceremony gave a distraction to my thoughts, and may have been useful in that way. But it led to an unfortunate circumstance. My Father began to enjoy these orisons at my bedside, and to prolong them. Perhaps they lasted a little too long, but I contrived to keep awake through them, sometimes by a great effort. On one unhappy night, however, I gave even worse offense than slumber would have given. My Father was praying aloud, in the attitude I have described, and I was half sitting, half lying in bed, with the clothes sloping from my chin. Suddenly a rather large insect—dark and flat, with more legs than a self-respecting insect ought to need—appeared at the bottom of the counterpane, and slowly advanced. I think it was nothing worse than a beetle. It walked successfully past my Father's sleek black ball of a head, and climbed straight up at me, nearer, nearer, until it seemed all a twinkle of horns and joints. I bore it in silent fascination until it almost tickled my chin, and then I screamed 'Papa! Papa!' My Father rose in great dudgeon, removed the insect (what were insects to him!) and then gave me a tremendous lecture. The sense of desperation which this incident produced I shall not easily forget. Life seemed really to be very harassing when to visions within and beetles without there was joined the consciousness of having grievously offended God by an act of disrespect. It is difficult for me to justify to myself the violent jobation which my Father gave me in consequence of my scream, except by attributing to him something of the human weakness of vanity. I cannot help thinking that he liked to hear himself speak to God in the presence of an admiring listener. He prayed with fervour and animation, in pure Johnsonian English, and I hope I am not undutiful if I add my impression that he was not displeased with the sound of his own devotions. My cry for help had needlessly, as he thought, broken in upon this holy and seemly performance. 'You, the child of a naturalist,' he remarked in awesome tones, 'you to pretend to feel terror at the advance of an insect?' It could but be a pretext, he declared, for avoiding the testimony of faith in prayer. 'If your heart were fixed, if it panted after the Lord, it would take more than the movements of a beetle to make you disturb oral supplication at His footstool. Beware! for God is a jealous God and He consumes them in wrath who make a noise like a dog.' My Father took at all times a singular pleasure in repeating that 'our God is a jealous God'. He liked the word, which I suppose he used in an antiquated sense. He was accustomed to tell the 'saints' at the Room,—in a very genial manner, and smiling at them as he said it,—'I am jealous over you, my beloved brothers and sisters, with a godly jealousy.' I know that this was interpreted by some of the saints,—for I heard Mary Grace say so to Miss Marks—as meaning that my Father was resentful because some of them attended the service at the Wesleyan chapel on Thursday evenings. But my Father was utterly incapable of such littleness as this, and when he talked of 'jealousy' he meant a lofty solicitude, a careful watchfulness. He meant that their spiritual honour was a matter of anxiety to him. No doubt when he used to tell me to remember that our God is a jealous God, he meant that my sins and shortcomings were not matters of indifference to the Divine Being. But I think, looking back, that it was very extraordinary for a man, so instructed and so intelligent as he, to dwell so much on the possible anger of the Lord, rather than on his pity and love. The theory of extreme Puritanism can surely offer no quainter example of its fallacy than this idea that the omnipotent Jehovah—could be seriously offended, and could stoop to revenge, because a little, nervous child of nine had disturbed a prayer by being frightened at a beetle. The fact that the word 'Carmine' appeared as the goal of my visionary pursuits is not so inexplicable as it may seem. My Father was at this time producing numerous water-colour drawings of minute and even of microscopic forms of life. These he executed in the manner of miniature, with an amazing fidelity of form and with a brilliancy of colour which remains unfaded after fifty years. By far the most costly of his pigments was the intense crimson which is manufactured out of the very spirit and, essence of cochineal. I had lately become a fervent imitator of his works of art, and I was allowed to use all of his colours, except one; I was strictly forbidden to let a hair of my paint- brush touch the little broken mass of carmine which was all that he possessed. We believed, but I do not know whether this could be the fact, that carmine of this superlative quality was sold at a guinea a cake. 'Carmine', therefore, became my shibboleth of self-indulgence; it was a symbol of all that taste and art and wealth could combine to produce. I imagined, for instance, that at Belshazzar's feast, the loftiest epergne of gold, surrounded by flowers and jewels, carried the monarch's proudest possession, a cake of carmine. I knew of no object in the world of luxury more desirable than this, and its obsession in my waking hours is quite enough, I think, to account for 'carmine' having been the torment of my dreams. The little incident of the beetle displays my Father's mood at this period in its worst light. His severity was not very creditable, perhaps, to his good sense, but without a word of explanation it may seem even more unreasonable than it was. My Father might have been less stern to my lapses from high conduct, and my own mind at the same time less armoured against his arrows, if our relations had been those which exist in an ordinary religious family. He would have been more indulgent, and my own affections might nevertheless have been more easily alienated, if I had been treated by him as a commonplace child, standing as yet outside the pale of conscious Christianity. But he had formed the idea, and cultivated it assiduously, that I was an ame d'elite, a being to whom the mysteries of salvation had been divinely revealed and by whom they had been accepted. I was, to his partial fancy, one in whom the Holy Ghost had already performed a real and permanent work. Hence, I was inside the pale; I had attained that inner position which divided, as we used to say, the Sheep from the Goats. Another little boy might be very well-behaved, but if he had not consciously 'laid hold on Christ', his good deeds, so far, were absolutely useless. Whereas I might be a very naughty boy, and require much chastisement from God and man, but nothing—so my Father thought—could invalidate my election, and sooner or later, perhaps even after many stripes, I must inevitably be brought back to a state of grace. The paradox between this unquestionable sanctification by faith and my equally unquestionable naughtiness, occupied my Father greatly at this time. He made it a frequent subject of intercession at family prayers, not caring to hide from the servants misdemeanours of mine, which he spread out with a melancholy unction before the Lord. He cultivated the belief that all my little ailments, all my aches and pains, were sent to correct my faults. He carried this persuasion very far, even putting this exhortation before, instead of after, an instant relief of my sufferings. If I burned my finger with a sulphur match, or pinched the end of my nose in the door (to mention but two sorrows that recur to my memory), my Father would solemnly ejaculate: 'Oh may these afflictions be much sanctified to him!' before offering any remedy for my pain. So that I almost longed, under the pressure of these pangs, to be a godless child, who had never known the privileges of saving grace, since I argued that such a child would be subjected to none of the sufferings which seemed to assail my path. What the ideas or conduct of 'another child' might be I had, however, at this time no idea, for, strange as it may sound, I had not, until my tenth year was far advanced, made acquaintance with any such creature. The 'saints' had children, but I was not called upon to cultivate their company, and I had not the slightest wish to do so. But early in 1859 I was allowed, at last, to associate with a child of my own age. I do not recall that this permission gave me any rapture; I accepted it philosophically but without that delighted eagerness which I might have been expected to show. My earliest companion, then, was a little boy of almost exactly my own age. His name was Benny, which no doubt was short for Benjamin. His surname was Jeffries; his mother—I think he had no father—was a solemn and shadowy lady of means who lived in a villa, which was older and much larger than ours, on the opposite side of the road. Going to 'play with Benny' involved a small public excursion, and this I was now allowed to make by myself—an immense source of self- respect. Everything in my little memories seems to run askew; obviously I ought to have been extremely stirred and broadened by this earliest association with a boy of my own age! Yet I cannot truly say that it was so. Benny's mother possessed what seemed to me a vast domain, with lawns winding among broad shrubberies, and a kitchen-garden, with aged fruit-trees in it. The ripeness of this place, mossed and leafy, was gratifying to my senses, on which the rawness of our own bald garden jarred. There was an old brick wall between the two divisions, upon which it was possible for us to climb up, and from this we gained Pisgah-views which were a prodigious pleasure. But I had not the faintest idea how to 'play'; I had never learned, had never heard of any 'games'. I think Benny must have lacked initiative almost as much as I did. We walked about, and shook the bushes, and climbed along the wall; I think that was almost all we ever did do. And, sadly enough, I cannot recover a phrase from Benny's lips, nor an action, nor a gesture, although I remember quite clearly how some grown-up people of that time looked, and the very words they said. For example, I recollect Miss Wilkes very distinctly, since I studied her with great deliberation, and with a suspicious watchfulness that was above my years. In Miss Wilkes a type that had hitherto been absolutely unfamiliar to us obtruded upon our experience. In our Eveless Eden, Woman, if not exactly hirsuta et horrida, had always been 'of a certain age'. But Miss Wilkes was a comparatively young thing, and she advanced not by any means unconscious of her charms. All was feminine, all was impulsive, about Miss Wilkes; every gesture seemed eloquent with girlish innocence and the playful dawn of life. In actual years I fancy she was not so extremely youthful, since she was the responsible and trusted headmistress of a large boarding-school for girls, but in her heart the joy of life ran high. Miss Wilkes had a small, round face, with melting eyes, and when she lifted her head, her ringlets seemed to vibrate and shiver like the bells of a pagoda. She had a charming way of clasping her hands, and holding them against her bodice, while she said, 'Oh, but—really now?' in a manner inexpressibly engaging. She was very earnest, and she had a pleading way of calling out: 'O, but aren't you teasing me?' which would have brought a tiger fawning to her crinoline. After we had spent a full year without any social distractions, it seems that our circle of acquaintances had now begun to extend, in spite of my Father's unwillingness to visit his neighbours. He was a fortress that required to be stormed, but there was considerable local curiosity about him, so that by-and- by escalading parties were formed, some of which were partly successful. In the first place, Charles Kingsley had never hesitated to come, from the beginning, ever since our arrival. He had reason to visit our neighbouring town rather frequently, and on such occasions he always marched up and attacked us. It was extraordinary how persistent he was, for my Father must have been a very trying friend. I vividly recollect that a sort of cross- examination of would-be communicants was going on in our half- furnished drawing-room one weekday morning, when Mr. Kingsley was announced; my Father, in stentorian tones, replied: 'Tell Mr. Kingsley that I am engaged in examining Scripture with certain of the Lord's children.' And I, a little later, kneeling at the window, while the candidates were being dismissed with prayer, watched the author of Hypatia nervously careening about the garden, very restless and impatient, yet preferring this ignominy to the chance of losing my Father's company altogether. Kingsley, a daring spirit, used sometimes to drag us out trawling with him in Torbay, and although his hawk's beak and rattling voice frightened me a little, his was always a jolly presence that brought some refreshment to our seriousness. But the other visitors who came in Kingsley's wake and without his excuse—how they disturbed us! We used to be seated, my Father at his microscope, I with my map or book, in the down- stairs room we called the study. There would be a hush around us in which you could hear a sea-anemone sigh. Then, abruptly, would come a ring at the front door; my Father would bend at me a corrugated brow, and murmur, under his breath, 'What's that?' and then, at the sound of footsteps, would bolt into the verandah, and around the garden into the potting-shed. If it was no visitor more serious than the postman or the tax-gatherer, I used to go forth and coax the timid wanderer home. If it was a caller, above all a female caller, it was my privilege to prevaricate, remarking innocently that 'Papa is out!' Into a paradise so carefully guarded, I know not how that serpent Miss Wilkes could penetrate, but there she was. She 'broke bread' with the Brethren at the adjacent town, from which she carried on strategical movements, which were, up to a certain point, highly successful. She professed herself deeply interested in microscopy, and desired that some of her young ladies should study it also. She came attended by an unimportant man, and by pupils to whom I had sometimes, very unwillingly, to show our 'natural objects'. They would invade us, and all our quietness with chattering noise; I could bear none of them, and I was singularly drawn to Miss Marks by finding that she disliked them too. By whatever arts she worked, Miss Wilkes certainly achieved a certain ascendancy. When the knocks came at the front door, I was now instructed to see whether the visitor were not she, before my Father bolted to the potting-shed. She was an untiring listener, and my Father had a genius for instruction. Miss Wilkes was never weary of expressing what a revelation of the wonderful works of God in creation her acquaintance with us had been. She would gaze through the microscope at awful forms, and would persevere until the silver rim which marked the confines of the drop of water under inspection would ripple inwards with a flash of light and vanish, because the drop itself had evaporated. 'Well, I can only say, how marvellous are Thy doings!' was a frequent ejaculation of Miss Wilkes, and one that was very well received. She learned the Latin names of many of the species, and it seems quite pathetic to me, looking back, to realize how much trouble the poor woman took. She 'hung', as the expression is, upon my Father's every word, and one instance of this led to a certain revelation. My Father, who had an extraordinary way of saying anything what Came into his mind, stated one day,—the fashions, I must suppose, being under discussion,—that he thought white the only becoming colour for a lady's stockings. The stockings of Miss Wilkes had up to that hour been of a deep violet, but she wore white ones in future whenever she came to our house. This delicacy would have been beyond my unaided infant observation, but I heard Miss Marks mention the matter, in terms which they supposed to be secret, to her confidante, and I verified it at the ankles of the lady. Miss Marks continued by saying, in confidence, and 'quite as between you and me, dear Mary Grace', that Miss Wilkes was a 'minx'. I had the greatest curiosity about words, and as this was a new one, I looked it up in our large 'English Dictionary'. But there the definition of the term was this:—'Minx: the female of minnock; a pert wanton.' I was as much in the dark as ever. Whether she was the female of a minnock (whatever that may be) or whether she was only a very well-meaning schoolmistress desirous of enlivening a monotonous existence, Miss Wilkes certainly took us out of ourselves a good deal. Did my Father know what danger he ran? It was the opinion of Miss Marks and of Mary Grace that he did not, and in the back-kitchen, a room which served those ladies as a private oratory in the summer-time, much prayer was offered up that his eyes might be opened ere it was too late. But I am inclined to think that they were open all the time, that, at all events, they were what the French call 'entr'ouvert', that enough light for practical purposes came sifted in through his eyelashes. At a later time, being reminded of Miss Wilkes, he said with a certain complaisance, 'Ah, yes! she proffered much entertainment during my widowed years!' He used to go down to her boarding-school, the garden of which had been the scene of a murder, and was romantically situated on the edge of a quarried cliff; he always took me with him, and kept me at his side all through these visits, notwithstanding Miss Wilkes' solicitude that the fatigue and excitement would be too much for the dear child's strength, unless I rested a little on the parlour sofa. About this time, the question of my education came up for discussion in the household, as indeed it well might. Miss Marks had long proved practically inadequate in this respect, her slender acquirements evaporating, I suppose, like the drops of water under the microscope, while the field of her general duties became wider. The subjects in which I took pleasure, and upon which I possessed books, I sedulously taught myself; the other subjects, which formed the vast majority, I did not learn at all. Like Aurora Leigh, I brushed with extreme flounce The circle of the universe, especially zoology, botany and astronomy, but with the explicit exception of geology, which my Father regarded as tending directly to the encouragement of infidelity. I copied a great quantity of maps, and read all the books of travels that I could find. But I acquired no mathematics, no languages, no history, so that I was in danger of gross illiteracy in these important departments. My Father grudged the time, but he felt it a duty to do something to fill up these deficiencies, and we now started Latin, in a little eighteenth-century reading-book, out of which my Grandfather had been taught. It consisted of strings of words, and of grim arrangements of conjunction and declension, presented in a manner appallingly unattractive. I used to be set down in the study, under my Father's eye, to learn a solid page of this compilation, while he wrote or painted. The window would be open in summer, and my seat was close to it. Outside, a bee was shaking the clematis-blossom, or a red-admiral butterfly was opening and shutting his wings on the hot concrete of the verandah, or a blackbird was racing across the lawn. It was almost more than human nature could bear to have to sit holding up to my face the dreary little Latin book, with its sheepskin cover that smelt of mildewed paste. But out of this strength there came an unexpected sudden sweetness. The exercise of hearing me repeat my strings of nouns and verbs had revived in my Father his memories of the classics. In the old solitary years, a long time ago, by the shores of Canadian rapids, on the edge of West Indian swamps, his Virgil had been an inestimable solace to him. To extremely devout persons, there is something objectionable in most of the great writers of antiquity. Horace, Lucretius, Terence, Catullus, Juvenal,—in each there is one quality or another definitely repulsive to a reader who is determined to know nothing but Christ and him crucified. From time immemorial, however, it has been recognized in the Christian church that this objection does not apply to Virgil. He is the most evangelical of the classics; he is the one who can be enjoyed with least to explain away and least to excuse. One evening my Father took down his Virgil from an upper shelf, and his thoughts wandered away from surrounding things; he travelled in the past again. The book was a Delphin edition of 1798, which had followed him in all his wanderings; there was a great scratch on the sheep-skin cover that a thorn had made in a forest of Alabama. And then, in the twilight, as he shut the volume at last, oblivious of my presence, he began to murmur and to chant the adorable verses by memory. Tityre, tu patulae recubans sub tegmine fagi, he warbled; and I stopped my play, and listened as if to a nightingale, until he reached tu, Tityre, lentus in umbra Formosam resonare doces Amaryllida silvan. 'Oh Papa, what is that?' I could not prevent myself from asking. He translated the verses, he explained their meaning, but his exposition gave me little interest. What to me was beautiful Amaryllis? She and her love-sick Tityrus awakened no image whatever in my mind. But a miracle had been revealed to me, the incalculable, the amazing beauty which could exist in the sound of verses. My prosodical instinct was awakened quite suddenly that dim evening, as my Father and I sat alone in the breakfast-room after tea, serenely accepting the hour, for once, with no idea of exhortation or profit. Verse, 'a breeze mid blossoms playing', as Coleridge says, descended from the roses as a moth might have done, and the magic of it took hold of my heart forever. I persuaded my Father, who was a little astonished at my insistence, to repeat the lines over and over again. At last my brain caught them, and as I walked in Benny's garden, or as I hung over the tidal pools at the edge of the sea, all my inner being used to ring out with the sound of Formosam resonare doces Amaryllida silvan. <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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