east; and with the horrible calmness of some self-
torturing ascetic, he sat down to sketch a drawing of himself and
Argemone on her dying day, with her head upon his bosom for the last
time--and then tossed it angrily into the fire, partly because he
felt just as he had in his attempts to write, that there was
something more in all these events than he could utter by pen or
pencil, than he could even understand; principally because he could
not arrange the attitudes gracefully enough. And now, in front of
the stern realities of sorrow and death, he began to see a meaning
in another mysterious saying of Barnakill's, which Mellot was
continually quoting, that 'Art was never Art till it was more than
Art; that the Finite only existed as a body of the Infinite; and
that the man of genius must first know the Infinite, unless he
wished to become not a poet, but a maker of idols.' Still he felt
in himself a capability, nay, an infinite longing to speak; though
what he should utter, or how--whether as poet, social theorist,
preacher, he could not yet decide. Barnakill had forbidden him
painting, and though he hardly knew why, he dared not disobey him.
But Argemone's dying words lay on him as a divine command to labour.
All his doubts, his social observations, his dreams of the beautiful
and the blissful, his intense perception of social evils, his new-
born hope--faith it could not yet be called--in a ruler and
deliverer of the world, all urged him on to labour: but at what?
He felt as if he were the demon in the legend, condemned to twine
endless ropes of sand. The world, outside which he now stood for
good and evil, seemed to him like some frantic whirling waltz; some
serried struggling crowd, which rushed past him in aimless
confusion, without allowing him time or opening to take his place
among their ranks: and as for wings to rise above, and to look down
upon the uproar, where were they? His melancholy paralysed him more
and more. He was too listless even to cater for his daily bread by
writing his articles for the magazines. Why should he? He had
nothing to say. Why should he pour out words and empty sound, and
add one more futility to the herd of 'prophets that had become wind,
and had no truth in them'? Those who could write without a
conscience, without an object except that of seeing their own fine
words, and filling their own pockets--let them do it: for his part
he