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unite the creature of today with the generations of the future. The work
has gone through the press, each line lingered over with the elaborate
patience of the artist, loath to part with the thought he has sculptured
into form, while an improving touch can be imparted by the chisel. He
has accepted an invitation from Norreys. In the restless excitement
(strange to him since his first happy maiden effort) he has gone to
London. Unrecognized in the huge metropolis, he has watched to see if
the world acknowledge the new tie he has woven between its busy life and
his secluded toil. And the work came out in an unpropitious hour; other
things were occupying the public; the world was not at leisure to heed
him, and the book did not penetrate into the great circle of readers.
But a savage critic has seized on it, and mangled, distorted, deformed
it, confounding together defect and beauty in one mocking ridicule; and
the beauties have not yet found an exponent, nor the defects a defender;
and the publisher shakes his head, points to groaning shelves, and
delicately hints that the work which was to be the epitome of the sacred
life within life does not hit the taste of the day. Leonard thinks over
the years that his still labour has cost him, and knows that he has
exhausted the richest mines of his intellect, and that long years will
elapse before he can recruit that capital of ideas which is necessary to
sink new shafts and bring to light fresh ore; and the deep despondency
of intellect, frustrated in its highest aims, has seized him, and all
he has before done is involved in failure by the defeat of the crowning
effort. Failure, and irrecoverable, seems his whole ambition as writer;
his whole existence in the fair Ideal seems to have been a profitless
dream, and the face of the Ideal itself is obscured. And even Norreys
frankly, though kindly, intimates that the life of a metropolis is
essential to the healthful intuition of a writer in the intellectual
wants of his age, since every great writer supplies a want in his own
generation, for some feeling to be announced, some truth to be revealed.
And as this maxim is generally sound, as most great writers have lived
in cities, Leonard dares not dwell on the exception; it is only success
that justifies the attempt to be an exception to the common rule; and
with the blunt manhood of his nature, which is not a poet's, Norreys
sums up with, "What then? One experiment has failed; fit