more finely expressed to meet a particular personal mood.
One must not think the world lost because a woman has been lost, he says,
and such a love is not a thing for any man to be ashamed of, in spite of
the fact that it has been disappointed. It was honourable, unselfish, not
inspired by any passion or any folly, and the very brevity of the
experience only serves to make it more precious. Observe the use of the
words "shrive" and "assoiled." These refer to the old religious custom of
confession; to "shrive" signifies to forgive, to free from sin, as a
priest is supposed to do, and "assoiled" means "purified."

If this was a personal experience, it must have been an experience of
advanced life. Elsewhere the story of a boyish love is told very prettily,
under the title of "Two Fragments of Childhood." This is the first
fragment:

When these locks were yellow as gold,
When past days were easily told,
Well I knew the voice of the sea,
Once he spake as a friend to me.
Thunder-rollings carelessly heard,
Once that poor little heart they stirred,
Why, Oh, why?
Memory, memory!
She that I wished to be with was by.

Sick was I in those misanthrope days
Of soft caresses, womanly ways;
Once that maid on the stair I met
Lip on brow she suddenly set.
Then flushed up my chivalrous blood,
Like Swiss streams in a mid-summer flood.
Then, Oh, then,
Imogen, Imogen!
Hadst thou a lover, whose years were ten.

This is evidently the charming memory of a little sick boy sent to the
seaside for his health, according to the English custom, and unhappy
there, unable to play about like stronger children, and obliged to remain
under the constant care of nurses and female relatives. But in the same
house there is another family with a beautiful young daughter, probably
sixteen or eighteen years old. The little boy wishes, wishes so much that
the beautiful lady would speak to him and play with him, but he is shy,
afraid to approach her--only looks at her with great admiring loving eyes.
But one day she meets him on the stairs, and stoops down and kisses him on
the forehead. Then he is in Heaven. Afterward no doubt she played with
him, and they walked up and down by the shore of the sea together, and
now, though an old man, whenever he hears the roar of the sea he remembers
the beautiful lady who played with him and caressed him, when he was a
little sick child. How much he loved her! But she was