me to need
relief from the depression which had become morbid. He has told it in
one of his first letters to me:--

"I am glad you had a pleasant time here. I had, and you made me
fifteen years younger while you stayed. When a man gets to my age,
enthusiasms don't often knock at the door of his garret. I am all
the more charmed with them when they come. A youth full of such
pure intensity of hope and faith and purpose, what is he but the
breath of a resurrection trumpet to us stiffened old fellows,
bidding us up out of our clay and earth if we would not be too
late?

"Your inspiration is still to you a living mistress; make her
immortal in her promptings and her consolations by imaging her
truly in art. Mine looks at me with eyes of paler flame, and
beckons across a gulf. You came into my loneliness like an
incarnate inspiration. And it is dreary enough sometimes; for a
mountain peak on whose snow your foot makes the first mortal print
is not so lonely as a room full of happy faces from which one is
missing forever."

The tone of his life at that period is given in the few poems of the
time, published later: the "Ode to Happiness," which he read to me
unfinished during that first visit; "The Wind-Harp," in which

"There murmured, as if one strove to speak,
And tears came instead; then the sad tones wandered
And faltered among the uncertain chords
In a troubled doubt between sorrow and words;
At last with themselves they questioned and pondered,
'Hereafter?--who knoweth?' and so they sighed
Down the long steps that lead to silence and died;"

"The Dead House," "Auf Wiedersehen (Summer)" and the "Palinode
(Autumn)," in which the first grief had deepened while losing its
acuteness, and the feeling of loneliness had taken largely the place
of the first desolation, the wrenching apart of soul and body:--

"It is pagan; but wait till you feel it,--
That jar of our earth, that dull shock
When the ploughshare of deeper passion
Tears down to our primitive rock;"

and some of his friends had tried the folly of condolence, to whom he
replies, in the same poem ("After the Burial"):--

"Console if you will, I can bear it;
'Tis a well-meant alms of breath;
But not all the preaching since Adam
Has made Death other than Death."

But the man was too robust in body and mind to linger long in the
shadows of melancholy, and tho