waking bird--by preference a
mavis--sings outside my window, for a little while after I swim upward
out of the ocean of sleep, it seems that I might possibly remember one
stanza of the deathless words; or even by chance recapture, like the
brown speckled thrush, that "first fine careless rapture" of the
adorable refrain_.

_Even when I arise and walk out in the dawn, as is my custom winter and
summer, still I have visions of this book of mine, of which I now
remember that the mystic name is "The Book Sealed." Sometimes in these
dreams of the morning, as I walk abroad, I find my hands upon the
clasps. I touch the binding wax of the seals. When the first rosy
fingers of the dawn point upward to the zenith with the sunlight behind
them, sanguine like a maid's hand held before a lamp, I catch a farewell
glimpse of the hidden pages_.

_Tales, not poems, are written upon them now. I hear the voices of "Them
Ones," as Irish folk impressively say of the Little People, telling me
tales out of the Book Sealed, tales which in the very hearing make a man
blush hotly and thrill with hopes mysterious. Such stories as they are!
The romances of high young blood, of maidens' winsome purity and frank
disdain, of strong men who take their lives in hand and hurl themselves
upon the push of pikes. And though I cannot grasp more than a hint of
the plot, yet as my feet swish through the dewy swathes of the hyacinths
or crisp along the frost-bitten snow, a wild thought quickens within me
into a belief, that one day I shall hear them all, and tell these tales
for my very own so that the world must listen_.

_But as the rosy fingers of the morn melt and the broad day fares forth,
the vision fades, and I who saw and heard must go and sit down to my
plain saltless tale. Once I wrote a book, every word of it, in the open
air. It was full of the sweet things of the country, so at least as they
seemed to me. I saw the hens nestle sleepily in the holes of the
bank-side where the dry dust is, and so I wrote it down. I heard the
rain drum on the broad leaves over my head, and I wrote that down also.
Day after day I rose and wrote in the dawn, and sometimes I seemed to
recapture a leaf or a passing glance of a chapter-heading out of the
Book Sealed. It came back to me how the girls were kissed and love was
made in the days when the Book Sealed was the Book Open, and when I
cared not a jot for anything that was written therein. So as well as I
could I