heart, to know
you had a bull's-eye at your belt, and to exult and sing over the
knowledge.

II

It is said that a poet has died young in the breast of the most stolid.
It may be contended, rather, that this (somewhat minor) bard in almost
every case survives, and is the spice of life to his possessor. Justice
is not done to the versatility and the unplumbed childishness of man's
imagination. His life from without may seem but a rude mound of mud;
there will be some golden chamber at the heart of it, in which he dwells
delighted; and for as dark as his pathway seems to the observer, he will
have some kind of a bull's-eye at his belt.

It would be hard to pick out a career more cheerless than that of
Dancer, the miser, as he figures in the "Old Bailey Reports," a prey to
the most sordid persecutions, the butt of his neighbourhood, betrayed by
his hired man, his house beleaguered by the impish school-boy, and he
himself grinding and fuming and impotently fleeing to the law against
these pin-pricks. You marvel at first that any one should willingly
prolong a life so destitute of charm and dignity; and then you call to
memory that had he chosen, had he ceased to be a miser, he could have
been freed at once from these trials, and might have built himself a
castle and gone escorted by a squadron. For the love of more recondite
joys, which we cannot estimate, which, it may be, we should envy, the
man had willingly forgone both comfort and consideration. "His mind to
him a kingdom was"; and sure enough, digging into that mind, which seems
at first a dust-heap, we unearth some priceless jewels. For Dancer must
have had the love of power and the disdain of using it, a noble
character in itself; disdain of many pleasures, a chief part of what is
commonly called wisdom; disdain of the inevitable end, that finest trait
of mankind; scorn of men's opinions, another element of virtue; and at
the back of all, a conscience just like yours and mine, whining like a
cur, swindling like a thimble-rigger, but still pointing (there or
thereabout) to some conventional standard. Here were a cabinet portrait
to which Hawthorne perhaps had done justice; and yet not Hawthorne
either, for he was mildly minded, and it lay not in him to create for us
that throb of the miser's pulse, his fretful energy of gusto, his vast
arms of ambition clutching in he knows not what: insatiable, insane, a
god with a muck-rake. Thus, at least, looking in the bo