o carry
out his dear and cherished scheme of coming to America.

Swift's journal, frank about nearly everything else in the man's life,
is significantly silent concerning Esther Vanhomrigh. And in truth there
was little to be said to anybody, and nothing at all to be confided to
Stella, in regard to this unhappy affair. That Swift was flattered to
find this girl of eighteen, with beauty and accomplishment, caring so
much for him, a man now forty-four, and bound by honour, if not by the
Church, to Stella, one cannot doubt. At first, their relations seem to
have been simply those of teacher and pupil, and this phase of the
matter it is which is most particularly described in the famous poem,
"Cadenus and Vanessa," written at Windsor in 1713, and first published
after Vanessa's death.

Human nature has perhaps never before or since presented the spectacle
of a man of such transcendent powers as Swift involved in such a
pitiable labyrinth of the affections as marked his whole life. Pride or
ambition led him to postpone indefinitely his marriage with Stella, to
whom he was early attached. Though he said he "loved her better than his
life a thousand millions of times," he kept her always hanging on in a
state of hope deferred, injurious alike to her peace and her reputation.
And because of Stella, he dared not afterward with manly sincerity admit
his undoubted affection for Vanessa. For, if one may believe Doctor
Johnson, he married Stella in 1716,--though he died without
acknowledging this union, and the date given would indicate that the
ceremony occurred while his devotion to his young pupil was at its
height.

Touching beyond expression is the story of Vanessa after she had gone to
Ireland, as Stella had gone before, to be near the presence of Swift.
Her life was one of deep seclusion, chequered only by the occasional
visits of the man she adored, each of which she commemorated by planting
with her own hand a laurel in the garden where they met. When all her
devotion and her offerings had failed to impress him, she sent him
remonstrances which reflect the agony of her mind:

"The reason I write to you," she says, "is because I cannot tell it you
should I see you. For when I begin to complain, then you are angry; and
there is something in your looks so awful, that it strikes me dumb. Oh!
that you may have but so much regard for me left that this complaint may
touch your soul with pity. I say as little as ever I can. Di