ited, quick for fun. A fellow, he thought, may brood upon Nature, but
the real children of Nature--or she loves them best--are those who have
the careless chatter, the ready laugh, bright welcome for a holiday. In
catching the hour, we are surely the bloom of the hour? Why, yes, and no
need to lose the rosy wisdom of the children when we wrap ourselves in
the patched old cloak of the man's.

On he went to his conclusions; but the Dame will have none of them,
though here was a creature bent on masonry-work in his act of thinking,
to build a traveller's-rest for thinkers behind him; while the volatile
were simply breaking their bubbles.

He was discontented all day, both with himself and the sentences he
coined. A small street-boy at his run along the pavement nowhither,
distanced him altogether in the race for the great Secret; precipitating
the thought, that the conscious are too heavily handicapped. The
unburdened unconscious win the goal. Ay, but they leave no legacy. So we
must fret and stew, and look into ourselves, and seize the brute and
scourge him, just to make one serviceable step forward: that is, utter a
single sentence worth the pondering for guidance.

Gower imagined the fun upon middle Thames: the vulcan face of Captain
Abrane; the cries of his backers, the smiles of the ladies, Lord
Fleetwood's happy style in the teeth of tattlean Aurora's chariot for
overriding it. One might hope, might almost see, that he was coming to
his better senses on a certain subject. As for style overriding the worst
of indignities, has not Scotia given her poet to the slack dependant of
the gallows-tree, who so rantingly played his jig and wheeled it round in
the shadow of that institution? Style was his, he hit on the right style
to top the situation, and perpetually will he slip his head out of the
noose to dance the poet's verse.

In fact, style is the mantle of greatness; and say that the greatness is
beyond our reach, we may at least pray to have the mantle.

Strangest of fancies, most unphilosophically, Gower conceived a woman's
love as that which would bestow the gift upon a man so bare of it as he.
Where was the woman? He embraced the idea of the sex, and found it
resolving to a form of one. He stood humbly before the one, and she waned
into swarms of her sisters. So did she charge him with the loving of her
sex, not her. And could it be denied, if he wanted a woman's love just to
give him a style? No, not that, but