garet
as she would be when she grew tall. He knew little of the glory that was
Greece or the grandeur that was Rome, but whatever they were, Margaret
had all of them, and the hyacinth hair, very thick and clustery and
beautiful, and the naiad airs. Ah, Psyche!

And he read forward and back in the book, and after a little he knew
that he had a soul, and that the only beautiful thing in the world is
beauty, and the only sad thing, and that beauty is truth.

Open at the lines to Helen he laid the book face down upon his heart,
with his hands clasped over it, and shut his eyes.

"Now I know what I've got to do," he said. "Now I know what I've got to
do."

He dreamed away hours until suddenly the need of deeds set him bolt
upright in bed, and he called to Mrs. Brackett to bring him pencil
and paper. From that time on he was seldom without them, and, by
turns reading and writing, entered with hope and fortitude into the
challenging field of literature. And from the first, however ignorant
and unkempt the effort, he wrote a kind of literature, for he buckled to
no work that he knew, and was forever striving after an ideal (nebulous,
indescribable, and far) of his own, and that is literature. Go to those
who have wrought for--forever (without, of course, knowing it) and those
who have wrought earnestly for the day, and these things you will find
made the god in their machine: Raphael's sonnets and Dante's picture!
Aladdin had no message, that he knew of, for the world, but the call
of one of the arts was upon him; and he knew that willy-nilly he must
answer that call as long as eyes could see, or hands hold pen, or tongue
call for pencil and paper, money buy them, or theft procure them. He set
himself stubbornly and courageously to the bitter-sweet task of learning
to write.

"It must be like learning anything else," he said, his eyes on a sheet
of seemingly uncorrectable misbalances, "and just because I'm rotten at
it now doesn't prove that if I practise and practise, and try and try,
and hope and hope, I won't be some good sometime."

He saw very clearly the squat dark tower itself in the midst of the
chin-upon-hand hills, and the world and his friends sitting about to
see him fail. He saw them, and he knew them all, and yet, with Childe
Roland,

Dauntless the slughorn to his lips he set,
And blew.

And incidentally, when he got well and returned to school, he entered
on a period of learning his lessons, fo