stly semblance of life. Her own language, strong
and pure, she found a sufficient instrument for her purpose. When the
true impulse to write came, her fine theories about style only
hampered her, so she cast them aside, as habitual affectations are
cast aside and natural emotions naturally expressed, in moments of
deep feeling; and from that time forward she displayed, what had
doubtless been coming to her by practice all along, a method and a
manner of her own.

She produced a little book at this time, the first thing of any real
importance she had accomplished as yet; and during the writing of it
she enjoyed an interval of unalloyed happiness, the most perfect that
she had ever known. The world without became as nothing to her; it was
the world within that signified. The terrible sense of loneliness,
from which she had always suffered more or less, was suspended, and
she began to wonder how it was she had ever felt so desolate, that
often in the streets of Slane she would have been grateful to anybody
who had spoken to her kindly. Now she said to herself, sincerely,
"Never less alone than when alone!" And up in the quiet of her secret
chamber, with the serene blue above, the green earth and the
whispering trees below, and all her little treasures about her: the
books, the pictures, the pretty hangings, and little ornaments for
flowers; things she had indulged in by degrees since her mother's
death had left her with the money in her hands which she had made to
discharge Dan's debt--up there at her ease in that peaceful shrine,
secure from intrusion, "There is no joy but calm!" was her constant
ejaculation. Then again, too, she felt to perfection the fine wonder,
the fine glow of a great inspiration, and realised anew that therein
all the pleasures of the senses added together are contained; that
inspiration in its higher manifestations is like love--that it is
love, in fact--love without the lover; there being all the joy of love
in it, but none of the trouble.

But, like most young writers when they set up a high ideal for
themselves, and are striving conscientiously to arrive at it, because
the thing came easily she fancied she had not done her best, and was
dissatisfied. She talked to herself about fatal facility, without
reflecting that in time ease comes by practice; nor did she
discriminate between the flow of cheap ideas pumped up from any source
for the occasion, which satisfies the conceit of shallow workers