s now, as oft as summer returns...."

I confess to a particular enjoyment of this essay, with its memory of
tapestried bedrooms setting forth upon their walls "the unappeasable
prudery of Diana" under the peeping eye of Actaeon; its echoing
galleries once so dreadful when the night wind caught the candle at
the turn; its hall of family portraits. But chiefly it is this
window-seat that holds me--the casement looking on the garden and its
southern sun-baked wall--the lad dreaming on his volume of Cowley, and
leaping the garden border for the stars. These are the things that I
admit most warmly to my affection.

It is not in the least that I am a lover of Cowley, who seems an
unpleasantly antiquated author. I would choose, instead, that the
youthful Elia were busy so early with one of his favorite
Elizabethans. He has himself hinted that he read "The Vicar of
Wakefield" in later days out of a tattered copy from a circulating
library, yet I would willingly move the occasion forward, coincident
to this. And I suspect that the artist Brock is also indifferent to
Cowley: for has he not laid two other volumes handy on the shelf for
the sure time when Cowley shall grow dull? Has he not even put Cowley
flat down upon his face, as if, already neglected, he had slipped from
the lad's negligent fingers--as if, indeed, Elia's far-striding
meditation were to him of higher interest than the stiff measure of
any poet?

I recall a child, dimly through the years, that lay upon the rug
before the fire to read his book, with his chin resting on both his
hands. His favorite hour was the winter twilight before the family
came together for their supper, for at that hour the lamplighter went
his rounds and threw a golden string of dots upon the street. He drove
an old thin horse and he stood on the seat of the cart with
up-stretched taper. But when the world grew dark the flare of the fire
was enough for the child to read, for he lay close against the hearth.
And as the shadows gathered in the room, there was one story chiefly,
of such intensity that the excitement of it swept through his body and
out into his waving legs. Perhaps its last copy has now vanished off
the earth. It dealt with a deserted house on a lonely road, where
chains clanked at midnight. Lights, too, seemingly not of earth,
glimmered at the windows, while groans--such was the dark fancy of the
author--issued from a windy tower. But there was one supreme chapter
in which