glistening river in the
distance, and the air filled, not only with the songs of birds, but all
the intoxicating and inaudible music of youth's dreams and visions. All
this phantasmagoria of memory is accompanied by the echo of a melodious,
rich voice, rising and falling, in the to me unfamiliar but delightful
accent of an educated Englishman: and the story of Ancient
Greece--sometimes her poetry with the loves of her gods, the fights, the
shouts of battle, the exhortations and the groans of her heroes--rises
once more before me. Or, again, I hear the tale told anew of that great
last immortal day in the life of Socrates, as the great Philosopher sank
to rest in a glory of self-sacrificing submission, serenity, and
courage--a story which moves the world to tears and admiration, and will
continue so to do as long as it endures. The voice of the teacher and
the friend still survives, which had this extraordinary power of giving
in the very different tongue of England all the glories of the poetry
and the prose of Greece; and other youths, doubtless like me, look out
under the spell of its music to that same green garden in far-off
Galway, by the side of Corrib's stream.

[Sidenote: Gladstone dreams.]

Of all this I sate musing during some idle moments in the middle of
March; for, as I looked at Mr. Gladstone, the whole scene was, by a
curious trick of memory and association, brought back to me. Everyone
who knew the great old Philosopher of Athens, will remember that he had
his familiar _daemon_, and that he believed himself to have constant
communication with him. If I remember rightly, there is a good deal
about that _daemon_ in his "Phaedo"--that wonderful story to which I have
just alluded, and which lives so vividly in my memory. Sometimes I think
that Mr. Gladstone has the same superstition. He has moments--especially
if there be the stress of the sheer brutality of obstructive and knavish
hostility--when he seems to retire into himself--to transfer himself on
the wings of imagination to regions infinitely beyond the reach, as well
as the ken, of the land in which the Lowthers, the Chamberlains, and the
Bartleys dwell. At such moments he gives one the impression of communing
with some spirit within his own breast--a familiar _daemon_, whose voice,
though still and silent to all outside, shouts louder than the roar of
faction or the shouts of brutish hate. Then it is that I remember what
depths of religious fervour