imself as truly the heir of
creation as any young man that lived. But his lot was cast, and his
youth had all the serious aspect to himself of thoughtful manhood. In
the region of his art alone he hoped always to find freedom and a
companionship which his home life could never give him.

Clement meant to have visited his beloved before he left Alderbank, but
was called unexpectedly back to the city. Happily Susan was not
exacting; she looked up to him with too great a feeling of distance
between them to dare to question his actions. Perhaps she found a
partial consolation in the company of Mr. Gifted Hopkins, who tried his
new poems on her, which was the next best thing to addressing them to
her. "Would that you were with us at this delightful season," she wrote
in the autumn; "but no, your Susan must not repine. Yet, in the
beautiful words of our native poet,

'O would, O would that thou wast here,
For absence makes thee doubly dear;
Ah! what is life while thou'rt away?
'Tis night without the orb of day!'"

The poet referred to, it need hardly be said, was our young and
promising friend G. H., as he sometimes modestly signed himself. The
letter, it is unnecessary to state, was voluminous,--for a woman can
tell her love, or other matter of interest, over and over again in as
many forms as another poet, not G. H., found for his grief in ringing
the musical changes of "In Memoriam."

The answers to Susan's letters were kind, but not very long. They
convinced her that it was a simple impossibility that Clement could come
to Oxbow Village, on account of the great pressure of the work he had to
keep him in the city, and the plans he _must_ finish at any rate. But at
last the work was partially got rid of, and Clement was coming; yes, it
was so nice, and, O dear! shouldn't she be real happy to see him?

To Susan he appeared as a kind of divinity,--almost too grand for human
nature's daily food. Yet, if the simple-hearted girl could have told
herself the whole truth in plain words, she would have confessed to
certain doubts which from time to time, and oftener of late, cast a
shadow on her seemingly bright future. With all the pleasure that the
thought of meeting Clement gave her, she felt a little tremor, a
certain degree of awe, in contemplating his visit. If she could have
clothed her self-humiliation in the gold and purple of the "Portuguese
Sonnets," it would have been another matter; but the trouble