the 'Lyrical Ballads' with finger in ear. Did not Shelley say long ago
'He had no more _imagination_ than a pint-pot'--though in those days
he used to walk about France and Flanders like a man? _Now_, he is
'most comfortable in his worldly affairs' and just this comes of it!
He lives the best twenty years of his life after the way of his own
heart--and when one presses in to see the result of the rare
experiment ... what the _one_ alchemist whom fortune has allowed to
get all his coveted materials and set to work at last in earnest with
fire and melting-pot--what _he_ produces after all the talk of him and
the like of him; why, you get _pulvis et cinis_--a man at the mercy of
the tongs and shovel!

Well! Let us despair at nothing, but, wishing success to the newer
aspirant, expect better things from Miss M. when the 'knoll,' and
'paradise,' and their facilities, operate properly; and that she will
make a truer estimate of the importance and responsibilities of
'authorship' than she does at present, if I understand rightly the
sense in which she describes her own life as it means to be; for in
one sense it is all good and well, and quite natural that she should
like 'that sort of strenuous handwork' better than book-making; like
the play better than the labour, as we are apt to do. If she realises
a very ordinary scheme of literary life, planned under the eye of God
not 'the public,' and prosecuted under the constant sense of the
night's coming which ends it good or bad--then, she will be sure to
'like' the rest and sport--teaching her maids and sewing her gloves
and making delicate visitors comfortable--so much more rational a
resource is the worst of them than gin-and-water, for instance. But
if, as I rather suspect, these latter are to figure as a virtual
_half_ duty of the whole Man--as of equal importance (on the ground of
the innocence and utility of such occupations) with the book-making
aforesaid--always supposing _that_ to be of the right kind--_then_ I
respect Miss M. just as I should an Archbishop of Canterbury whose
business was the teaching A.B.C. at an infant-school--he who might set
on the Tens to instruct the Hundreds how to convince the Thousands of
the propriety of doing that and many other things. Of course one will
respect him only the more if when _that_ matter is off his mind he
relaxes at such a school instead of over a chess-board; as it will
increase our love for Miss M. to find that making 'my g