the work being tinged with delight? It is as though a
tired man set out to make a butterfly out of cardboard and gum and
powdered silks; it would be nothing when it was made. A book must,
before all things, have vigour; and vigour cannot be germinated by a
sense of duty; it can only spring from hope and confidence and desire.

But now, to-day, my darling has gone from me; he is jolting in some
dusty van, or he is propelled through muddy streets in a red box on
wheels; or perhaps he is already in the factory among the rattle of
type and the throb of the printing-press. I feel like a father whose
boy has gone to school, and who sits wondering how the child may be
faring in the big, unfamiliar place. Well, I will not grieve; but
rather I will thank the Father of all things living, the inspirer of
all sweet and delicate thoughts, all pleasant fancies, all glowing
words, for the joy that I have had.

XV

In one respect only does the advance of age cast a shadow over my mind;
in most matters it is a pure gain. Even though a certain peculiar
quality of light-hearted happiness visits me more rarely--a happiness
like that of a lark that soars, beats her wings, and trills in the blue
sky--yet the loss is more than compensated for by the growth of an
equable tranquillity, neither rapturous nor sad, which abides with me
for long spaces.

But here is the secret wound--_clausum pectore volnus!_--I am or would
be an artist in words. Well, when I look round at the work of the
artists whose quality I envy and adore, I am struck by this alarming
fact, that in almost every case their earliest work is their best work.

This is almost invariably true in one particular domain, that of purely
imaginative poetical work. By which I do not mean poetry only, but
poetical prose like Pater's, poetical fiction like Charlotte Bronte's;
I think that a narrative writer, a humorous writer, a critical writer,
a biographical writer may continue to improve until his faculties begin
to decay. He may get a wider, a more penetrating, a more tolerant view
of life; his style gain lucidity, impressiveness, incisiveness,
pungency; but in the case of the poetical and the reflective writer it
seems to me that something evaporates--some quite peculiar freshness,
naivete, indiscreetness, which, can never be recaptured. Take a few
typical instances. Coleridge lost the poetical gift altogether when he
left his youth behind; Wordsworth wrote all his best p