ters--it touched and
illuminated the dead outer world. The road between Wem and Shrewsbury
was familiar enough to Hazlitt, but as the twain passed along it on that
winter day, it became etherealised, poetic--wonderful, as if leading
across the Delectable Mountains to the Golden City, whose gleam is
discernible on the horizon. The milestones were mute with attention, the
pines upon the hill had ears for the stranger as he passed. Eloquence
made the red leaves rustle on the oak; made the depth of heaven seem as
if swept by a breath of spring; and when the evening star appeared,
Hazlitt saw it as Adam did while in Paradise and but one day old. "As we
passed along," writes the essayist, "between Wem and Shrewsbury, and I
eyed the blue hill tops seen through the wintry branches, or the red,
rustling leaves of the sturdy oak-trees by the wayside, a sound was in my
ears as of a siren's song. I was stunned, startled with it as from deep
sleep; but I had no notion that I should ever be able to express my
admiration to others in motley imagery or quaint allusion, till the light
of his genius shone into my soul, like the sun's rays glittering in the
puddles of the road. I was at that time dumb, inarticulate, helpless,
like a worm by the wayside, crushed, bleeding, lifeless; but now,
bursting from the deadly bands that bound them, my ideas float on winged
words, and as they expand their plumes, catch the golden light of other
years. My soul has indeed remained in its original bondage, dark,
obscure, with longings infinite and unsatisfied; my heart, shut up in the
prison-house of this rude clay, has never found, nor will it ever find, a
heart to speak to; but that my understanding also did not remain dumb and
brutish, or at length found a language to express itself, I owe to
Coleridge." Time and sorrow, personal ambition thwarted and fruitlessly
driven back on itself, hopes for the world defeated and unrealised,
changed the enthusiastic youth into a petulant, unsocial man; yet ever as
he remembered that meeting and his wintry walk from Wem to Shrewsbury,
the early glow came back, and a "sound was in his ears as of a siren's
song."

We are not all hero-worshippers like Hazlitt, but most of us are so to a
large extent. A large proportion of mankind feel a quite peculiar
interest in famous writers. They like to read about them, to know what
they said on this or the other occasion, what sort of house they
inhabited, what fashi