in an instant, and the financial stock was small, seeing
how big an enterprise was to be started on it, and somehow the story
would not form. What ghostly wrestling of the spirit with vague shadows
which would take no shape! what sleepless tossings there were!--what
fruitless rambles in the darkened streets! what hurried walks to
Hampstead Heath! and what slow prowlings there amongst the gone! And,
then, how the Concept came suddenly from nowhere, without a warning,
without an effort, and stood up serene and strong, and bursting through
and through with passion as if it had been alive and fully grown for
years. Then to pen and ink and paper, not yet a weariness to soul and
flesh! as they were to be in after days, the virgin page an invitation,
the ink-pot a magic fountain, the very feel of the pen between thumb and
finger a pleasure. There was no thought in those fresh days of stinting
labour or of making rules for it--so many hours for work and so many
hours for recreation, and such and such hours for meals. The book--the
book was everything. He went to sleep with his people. He awoke to them.
He lived all day with them. He found them more real than the living.
Life was one vivid rage of emotion, of laughter, and of tears. His
own pathetics and his own humours were the sweetest things he had ever
known, and he cried at the one and laughed at the other more than the
most sentimental of readers ever laughed and cried over any book that
was ever written. And it was at this time that he wrote certain verses
in which he set forth his beliefs in art. The lonely man in his eyrie in
the Rockies, reviewing the bygone time, murmured what he could recall of
these:

'"A land of fire and a land of frost
Build!" said the Lord of the Soul;
"And lay me an ocean from coast to coast,
And let it be awful with many a ghost
Of galleons laden with gold, and lost
In the smothering surge's roll.

'"And make me a myriad rounded stars
To spangle my firmament,
Sweet like Hesper, glad with the balm
Of a ceaseless, passionless, changeless calm
And hot like Sirius, and red like Mars
With a god-like discontent.

'"And frame in the land of fire," he said,
"Frame me a soul like thine:
Swift as the snail's soft horn to feel,
Yet hard and keen as the tempered steel,
And be there a fire in heart and head
Demoniac and divine."'

The rest of the words had n