en it came to him
again he might ravish his soul with the hugging assurance given by the
thick lead to certain ecstatic lines of _Endymion,_ such as--

'My soul doth melt
For the unhappy youth;'
'He surely cannot now
Thirst for another love;'

and luxuriate in a genial sense of godship where the tremulous pencil
had left the record of a sigh against--

'Each tender maiden whom he once thought fair.'

But it was a magnanimous godship; and, after a moment's leaning back
with closed eyes, to draw in all the sweet incense, how nobly would he
act, in imaginative vignette, the King Cophetua to this poor suppliant
of love; with what a generous waiving of his power--and with what a
grace!--did he see himself raising her from her knees, and seating her
at his right hand. Yet those pencil-marks, alas! mark but a secondary
interest in that volume. A little sketch on the fly-leaf, 'by another
hand,' witness the prettier memory. A sacred valley, guarded by smooth,
green hills; in the midst a little lake, fed at one end by a singing
stream, swallowed at the other by the roaring darkness of a mill; green
rushes prosperous in the shallows, and along the other bank an old
hedgerow; a little island in the midst, circled by silver lilies; and in
the distance, rising from out a cloud of tangled green, above the little
river, an old church tower. Below, though not 'in the picture,' a quaint
country house, surrounded by a garden of fair fruit-trees and wonderful
bowers, through which ran the stream, free once again, and singing for
joy of the light. In the great lone house a solitary old man, cherished
and ruled by--'The Miller's Daughter.' Was scene ever more in need of a
fairy prince? Narcissus sighed, as he broke upon it one rosy evening,
to think what little meaning all its beauty had, suffering that lack;
but as he had come thither with the purpose, at once firm and vague, of
giving it a memory, he could afford to sigh till morning's light
brought, maybe, the opportunity of that transfiguring action. He was to
spend an Easter fortnight there, as the guest of some farmer-relatives
with whom he had stayed years before, in a period to which, being
nineteen, he already alluded as his 'boyhood.'

And it is not quite accurate to say that it had no memory for him, for
he brought with him one of that very miller's daughter, though, indeed,
it was of the shadowiest silver. It had chanced at that early time that
an influx of