need to be a Casanova--which
Harkness was in his little way--and I have had no aptitude for the
part. But as I said just now I absorbed his teachings and made use of
them. So far as he gave me food for reflection I ate it, and
assimilated it in my own manner. Neither by him nor by any person far
more considerable than himself has my imagination been moved in the
direction of the mover of it. Let great poet, great musician, great
painter stir me ever so deeply, I have never been able to follow him
an inch. I was excited by pictures to see new pictures of my own, by
poems to make poems--of my own, not of theirs. In these, no doubt,
were elements of theirs; there was a borrowed something, a quality, an
accent, a spirit of attack. But the forms were mine, and the setting
always so. All my life I have used other men's art and wisdom as a
spring-board. I suppose every poet can say the same. This was to be
the use to me of the lessons of the precocious, affectionate, and
philoprogenitive Harkness.

I remember very well one golden summer evening when he and I lay
talking under a great oak--he expounding and I plucking at the grass
as I listened, or let my mind go free--how, quite suddenly, the mesh
he was weaving about my groping mind parted in the midst and showed me
for an appreciable moment a possibility of something--it was no
more--which he could never have seen.

From the dense shade in which we lay there stretched out an avenue of
timber trees, whereunder the bracken, breast high, had been cut to
make a ride. Upon this bracken, and upon this smooth channel in the
midst the late sun streamed toward us, a soft wash of gold. Behind all
this the sky, pale to whiteness immediately overhead, deepened to the
splendid orange of the sunset. Each tree cast his shadow upon his
neighbour, so that only the topmost branches burned in the light.
Over and above us floated the drowsy hum of the insect world; rarely
we heard the moaning of a wood-dove, more rarely still the stirring of
deer hidden in the thicket shade. This was a magical evening, primed
with wonders, in the glamour of which Master Harkness could find
nothing better for him to rehearse than the progress of his amours
with his mother's housemaid. Yet something of the evening glow,
something of the opulence of summer smouldered in his words. He
painted his mistress with the colour of the sunset, he borrowed of it
burnt gold to deck her clay. He hymned the whiteness of her