ht when all the maze of streets was empty and silent was of the
problem, and his dreams ran on phrases, and when he awoke in the morning
he was eager to get back to his desk. He immersed himself in a minute,
almost a microscopic analysis of fine literature. It was no longer
enough, as in the old days, to feel the charm and incantation of a line
or a word; he wished to penetrate the secret, to understand something of
the wonderful suggestion, all apart from the sense, that seemed to him
the _differentia_ of literature, as distinguished from the long follies
of "character-drawing," "psychological analysis," and all the stuff that
went to make the three-volume novel of commerce.

He found himself curiously strengthened by the change from the hills to
the streets. There could be no doubt, he thought, that living a lonely
life, interested only in himself and his own thoughts, he had become in a
measure inhuman. The form of external things, black depths in woods,
pools in lonely places, those still valleys curtained by hills on every
side, sounding always with the ripple of their brooks, had become to him
an influence like that of a drug, giving a certain peculiar color and
outline to his thoughts. And from early boyhood there had been another
strange flavor in his life, the dream of the old Roman world, those
curious impressions that he had gathered from the white walls of
Caermaen, and from the looming bastions of the fort. It was in reality
the subconscious fancies of many years that had rebuilt the golden city,
and had shown him the vine-trellis and the marbles and the sunlight in
the garden of Avallaunius. And the rapture of love had made it all so
vivid and warm with life, that even now, when he let his pen drop, the
rich noise of the tavern and the chant of the theatre sounded above the
murmur of the streets. Looking back, it was as much a part of his life as
his schooldays, and the tessellated pavements were as real as the square
of faded carpet beneath his feet.

But he felt that he had escaped. He could now survey those splendid and
lovely visions from without, as if he read of opium dreams, and he no
longer dreaded a weird suggestion that had once beset him, that his very
soul was being molded into the hills, and passing into the black mirror
of still waterpools. He had taken refuge in the streets, in the harbor of
a modern suburb, from the vague, dreaded magic that had charmed his
life. Whenever he felt inclined t