rately in love with ten thousand women at
once is just that which prevents all our portraits being distinctly
seen upon that wall. They all ARE painted there by reflection from
our faces, but because ALL of them are painted on each spot, and
each on the same surface, and many other objects at the same time,
no one is seen as a picture. But darken a chamber and let a single
pencil of rays in through a key-hole, then you have a picture on
the wall. We never fall in love with a woman in distinction from
women, until we can get an image of her through a pin-hole; and
then we can see nothing else, and nobody but ourselves can see the
image in our mental camera-obscura.

--My friend, the Poet, tells me he has to leave town whenever the
anniversaries come round.

What's the difficulty?--Why, they all want him to get up and make
speeches, or songs, or toasts; which is just the very thing he
doesn't want to do. He is an old story, he says, and hates to show
on these occasions. But they tease him, and coax him, and can't do
without him, and feel all over his poor weak head until they get
their fingers on the fontanelle, (the Professor will tell you what
this means,--he says the one at the top of the head always remains
open in poets,) until, by gentle pressure on that soft pulsating
spot, they stupefy him to the point of acquiescence.

There are times, though, he says, when it is a pleasure, before
going to some agreeable meeting, to rush out into one's garden and
clutch up a handful of what grows there,--weeds and violets
together,--not cutting them off, but pulling them up by the roots
with the brown earth they grow in sticking to them. That's his
idea of a post-prandial performance. Look here, now. These verses
I am going to read you, he tells me, were pulled up by the roots
just in that way, the other day.--Beautiful entertainment,--names
there on the plates that flow from all English-speaking tongues as
familiarly as AND or THE; entertainers known wherever good poetry
and fair title-pages are held in esteem; guest a kind-hearted,
modest, genial, hopeful poet, who sings to the hearts of his
countrymen, the British people, the songs of good cheer which the
better days to come, as all honest souls trust and believe, will
turn into the prose of common life. My friend, the Poet, says you
must not read such a string of verses too literally. If he trimmed
it nicely below, you wouldn't see the roots, he says, and he li