KENELM slept in London that night, and, the next day, being singularly
fine for an English summer, he resolved to go to Moleswich on foot.
He had no need this time to encumber himself with a knapsack; he had
left sufficient change of dress in his lodgings at Cromwell Lodge.
It was towards the evening when he found himself in one of the
prettiest rural villages by which
"Wanders the hoary Thames along
His silver-winding way."
It was not in the direct road from London to Moleswich, but it was a
pleasanter way for a pedestrian. And when, quitting the long street
of the sultry village, he came to the shelving margin of the river, he
was glad to rest a while, enjoy the cool of the rippling waters, and
listen to their placid murmurs amid the rushes in the bordering
shallows. He had ample time before him. His rambles while at
Cromwell Lodge had made him familiar with the district for miles round
Moleswich, and he knew that a footpath through the fields at the right
would lead him, in less than an hour, to the side of the tributary
brook on which Cromwell Lodge was placed, opposite the wooden bridge
which conducted to Grasmere and Moleswich.
To one who loves the romance of history, English history, the whole
course of the Thames is full of charm. Ah! could I go back to the
days in which younger generations than that of Kenelm Chillingly were
unborn, when every wave of the Rhine spoke of history and romance to
me, what fairies should meet on thy banks, O thou our own Father
Thames! Perhaps some day a German pilgrim may repay tenfold to thee
the tribute rendered by the English kinsman to the Father Rhine.
Listening to the whispers of the reeds, Kenelm Chillingly felt the
haunting influence of the legendary stream. Many a poetic incident or
tradition in antique chronicle, many a votive rhyme in song, dear to
forefathers whose very names have become a poetry to us, thronged
dimly and confusedly back to his memory, which had little cared to
retain such graceful trinkets in the treasure-house of love. But
everything that, from childhood upward, connects itself with romance,
revives with yet fresher bloom in the memories of him who loves.
And to this man, through the first perilous season of youth, so
abnormally safe from youth's most wonted peril,--to this would-be
pupil of realism, this learned adept in the schools of a Welby or a
Mivers,--to this man, love came at last as with the fatal powers of
the fabled Cytherea; and with that love all the realisms of life
became ideals, all the stern lines of our commonplace destinies
undulated into curves of beauty, all the trite sounds of our every-day
life attuned into delicacies of song. How full of sanguine yet dreamy
bliss was his heart--and seemed his future--in the gentle breeze and
the softened glow of that summer eve! He should see Lily the next
morn, and his lips were now free to say all that they had as yet
suppressed.
Suddenly he was roused from the half-awake, half-asleep happiness that
belongs to the moments in which we transport ourselves into Elysium,
by the carol of a voice more loudly joyous than that of his own
heart--
"Singing, singing,
Lustily singing,
Down the road, with his dogs before,
Came the Ritter of Nierestein."
Kenelm turned his head so quickly that he frightened Max, who had for
the last minute been standing behind him inquisitively with one paw
raised, and sniffing, in some doubt whether he recognized an old
acquaintance; but at Kenelm's quick movement the animal broke into a
nervous bark, and ran back to his master.
The minstrel, little heeding the figure reclined on the bank, would
have passed on with his light tread and his cheery carol, but Kenelm
rose to his feet, and holding out his hand, said, "I hope you don't
share Max's alarm at meeting me again?"
"Ah, my young philosopher, is it indeed you?"
"If I am to be designated a philosopher it is certainly not I. And,
honestly speaking, I am not the same. I, who spent that pleasant day
with you among the fields round Luscombe two years ago--"
"Or who advised me at Tor Hadham to string my lyre to the praise of a
beefsteak. I, too, am not quite the same,--I, whose dog presented you
with the begging-tray."
"Yet you still go through the world singing."
"Even that vagrant singing time is pretty well over. But I disturbed
you from your repose; I would rather share it. You are probably not
going my way, and as I am in no hurry, I should not like to lose the
opportunity chance has so happily given me of renewing acquaintance
with one who has often been present to my thoughts since we last met."
Thus saying, the minstrel stretched himself at ease on the bank, and
Kenelm followed his example.
There certainly was a change in the owner of the dog with the
begging-tray, a change in costume, in countenance, in that
indescribable self-evidence which we call "manner." The costume was
not that Bohemian attire in which Kenelm had first encountered the
wandering minstrel, nor the studied, more graceful garb, which so well
became his shapely form during his visit to Luscombe. It was now
neatly simple, the cool and quiet summer dress any English gentleman
might adopt in a long rural walk. And as he uncovered his head to
court the cooling breeze, there was a graver dignity in the man's
handsome Rubens-like face, a line of more concentrated thought in the
spacious forehead, a thread or two of gray shimmering here and there
through the thick auburn curls of hair and beard. And in his manner,
though still very frank, there was just perceptible a sort of
self-assertion, not offensive, but manly; such as does not misbecome
one of maturer years, and of some established position, addressing
another man much younger than himself, who in all probability has
achieved no position at all beyond that which the accident of birth
might assign to him.
"Yes," said the minstrel, with a half-suppressed sigh, "the last year
of my vagrant holidays has come to its close. I recollect that the
first day we met by the road-side fountain, I advised you to do like
me, seek amusement and adventure as a foot-traveller. Now, seeing
you, evidently a gentleman by education and birth, still a
foot-traveller, I feel as if I ought to say, 'You have had enough of
such experience: vagabond life has its perils as well as charms; cease
it, and settle down.'"
"I think of doing so," replied Kenelm, laconically.
"In a profession?--army, law, medicine?"
"No."
"Ah, in marriage then. Right; give me your hand on that. So a
petticoat indeed has at last found its charm for you in the actual
world as well as on the canvas of a picture?"
"I conclude," said Kenelm, evading any direct notice of that playful
taunt, "I conclude from your remark that it is in marriage /you/ are
about to settle down."
"Ay, could I have done so before I should have been saved from many
errors, and been many years nearer to the goal which dazzled my sight
through the haze of my boyish dreams."
"What is that goal,--the grave?"
"The grave! That which allows of no grave,--fame."
"I see--despite of what you just now said--you still mean to go
through the world seeking a poet's fame."
"Alas! I resign that fancy," said the minstrel, with another
half-sigh. "It was not indeed wholly, but in great part the hope
of the poet's fame that made me a truant in the way to that which
destiny, and such few gifts as Nature conceded to me, marked
out for my proper and only goal. But what a strange, delusive
Will-o'-the-Wisp the love of verse-making is! How rarely a man of
good sense deceives himself as to other things for which he is fitted,
in which he can succeed; but let him once drink into his being the
charm of verse-making, how the glamour of the charm bewitches his
understanding! how long it is before he can believe that the world
will not take his word for it, when he cries out to sun, moon, and
stars, 'I, too, am a poet.' And with what agonies, as if at the wrench
of soul from life, he resigns himself at last to the conviction that
whether he or the world be right, it comes to the same thing. Who can
plead his cause before a court that will not give him a hearing?"
It was with an emotion so passionately strong, and so intensely
painful, that the owner of the dog with the begging-tray thus spoke,
that Kenelm felt, through sympathy, as if he himself were torn asunder
by the wrench of life from soul. But then Kenelm was a mortal so
eccentric that, if a single acute suffering endured by a fellow mortal
could be brought before the evidence of his senses, I doubt whether he
would not have suffered as much as that fellow-mortal. So that,
though if there were a thing in the world which Kenelm Chillingly
would care not to do, it was verse-making, his mind involuntarily
hastened to the arguments by which he could best mitigate the pang of
the verse-maker.
Quoth he: "According to my very scanty reading, you share the love of
verse-making with men the most illustrious in careers which have
achieved the goal of fame. It must, then, be a very noble love:
Augustus, Pollio, Varius, Maecenas,--the greatest statesmen of their
day,--they were verse-makers. Cardinal Richelieu was a verse-maker;
Walter Raleigh and Philip Sidney, Fox, Burke, Sheridan, Warren
Hastings, Canning, even the grave William Pitt,--all were
verse-makers. Verse-making did not retard--no doubt the qualities
essential to verse-making accelerated--their race to the goal of fame.
What great painters have been verse-makers! Michael Angelo, Leonardo
da Vinci, Salvator Rosa"--and Heaven knows how may other great names
Kenelm Chillingly might have proceeded to add to his list, if the
minstrel had not here interposed.
"What! all those mighty painters were verse-makers?"
"Verse-makers so good, especially Michael Angelo,--the greatest
painter of all,--that they would have had the fame of poets, if,
unfortunately for that goal of fame, their glory in the sister art of
painting did not outshine it. But when you give to your gift of song
the modest title of verse-making, permit me to observe that your gift
is perfectly distinct from that of the verse-maker. Your gift,
whatever it may be, could not exist without some sympathy with the non
verse-making human heart. No doubt in your foot travels, you have
acquired not only observant intimacy with external Nature in the
shifting hues at each hour of a distant mountain, in the lengthening
shadows which yon sunset casts on the waters at our feet, in the
habits of the thrush dropped fearlessly close beside me, in that turf
moistened by its neighbourhood to those dripping rushes, all of which
I could describe no less accurately than you,--as a Peter Bell might
describe them no less accurately than a William Wordsworth. But in
such songs of yours as you have permitted me to hear, you seem to have
escaped out of that elementary accidence of the poet's art, and to
touch, no matter how slightly, on the only lasting interest which the
universal heart of man can have in the song of the poet; namely, in
the sound which the poet's individual sympathy draws forth from the
latent chords in that universal heart. As for what you call 'the
world,' what is it more than the fashion of the present day? How far
the judgment of that is worth a poet's pain I can't pretend to say.
But of one thing I am sure, that while I could as easily square the
circle as compose a simple couplet addressed to the heart of a simple
audience with sufficient felicity to decoy their praises into Max's
begging-tray, I could spin out by the yard the sort of verse-making
which characterizes the fashion of the present day."
Much flattered, and not a little amused, the wandering minstrel turned
his bright countenance, no longer dimmed by a cloud, towards that of
his lazily reclined consoler, and answered gayly,--
"You say that you could spin out by the yard verses in the fashion of
the present day. I wish you would give me a specimen of your skill in
that handiwork."
"Very well; on one condition, that you will repay my trouble by a
specimen of your own verses, not in the fashion of the present
day,--something which I can construe. I defy you to construe mine."
"Agreed."
"Well, then, let us take it for granted that this is the Augustan age
of English poetry, and that the English language is dead, like the
Latin. Suppose I am writing for a prize-medal in English, as I wrote
at college for a prize-medal in Latin: of course, I shall be
successful in proportion as I introduce the verbal elegances peculiar
to our Augustan age, and also catch the prevailing poetic
characteristic of that classical epoch.
"Now I think that every observant critic will admit that the striking
distinctions of the poetry most in the fashion of the present day,
namely, of the Augustan age, are,--first, a selection of such verbal
elegances as would have been most repulsive to the barbaric taste of
the preceding century; and, secondly, a very lofty disdain of all
prosaic condescensions to common-sense, and an elaborate cultivation
of that element of the sublime which Mr. Burke defines under the head
of obscurity.
"These premises conceded, I will only ask you to choose the metre.
Blank verse is very much in fashion just now."
"Pooh! blank verse indeed! I am not going so to free your experiment
from the difficulties of rhyme."
"It is all one to me," said Kenelm, yawning; "rhyme be it: heroic or
lyrical?"
"Heroics are old-fashioned; but the Chaucer couplet, as brought to
perfection by our modern poets, I think the best adapted to dainty
leaves and uncrackable nuts. I accept the modern Chaucerian. The
subject?"
"Oh, never trouble yourself about that. By whatever title your
Augustan verse-maker labels his poem, his genius, like Pindar's,
disdains to be cramped by the subject. Listen, and don't suffer Max
to howl, if he can help it. Here goes."
And in an affected but emphatic sing-song Kenelm began:--
"In Attica the gentle Pythias dwelt.
Youthful he was, and passing rich: he felt
As if nor youth nor riches could suffice
For bliss. Dark-eyed Sophronia was a nice
Girl: and one summer day, when Neptune drove
His sea-car slowly, and the olive grove
That skirts Ilissus, to thy shell, Harmonia,
Rippled, he said 'I love thee' to Sophronia.
Crocus and iris, when they heard him, wagged
Their pretty heads in glee: the honey-bagged
Bees became altars: and the forest dove
Her plumage smoothed. Such is the charm of love.
Of this sweet story do ye long for more?
Wait till I publish it in volumes four;
Which certain critics, my good friends, will cry
Up beyond Chaucer. Take their word for 't. I
Say 'Trust them, but not read,--or you'll not buy.'"
"You have certainly kept your word," said the minstrel, laughing; "and
if this be the Augustan age, and the English were a dead language, you
deserve to win the prize-medal."
"You flatter me," said Kenelm, modestly. "But if I, who never before
strung two rhymes together, can improvise so readily in the style of
the present day, why should not a practical rhymester like yourself
dash off at a sitting a volume or so in the same style; disguising
completely the verbal elegances borrowed, adding to the delicacies of
the rhyme by the frequent introduction of a line that will not scan,
and towering yet more into the sublime by becoming yet more
unintelligible? Do that, and I promise you the most glowing panegyric
in 'The Londoner,' for I will write it myself."
"'The Londoner'!" exclaimed the minstrel, with an angry flush on his
cheek and brow, "my bitter, relentless enemy."
"I fear, then, you have as little studied the critical press
of the Augustan age as you have imbued your muse with the classical
spirit of its verse. For the art of writing a man must cultivate
himself. The art of being reviewed consists in cultivating the
acquaintance of reviewers. In the Augustan age criticism is cliquism.
Belong to a clique and you are Horace or Tibullus. Belong to no
clique and, of course, you are Bavius or Maevius. 'The Londoner' is
the enemy of no man: it holds all men in equal contempt. But as, in
order to amuse, it must abuse, it compensates the praise it is
compelled to bestow upon the members of its clique by heaping
additional scorn upon all who are cliqueless. Hit him hard: he has no
friends."
"Ah," said the minstrel, "I believe that there is much truth in what
you say. I never had a friend among the cliques. And Heaven knows
with what pertinacity those from whom I, in utter ignorance of the
rules which govern so-called organs of opinion, had hoped, in my time
of struggle, for a little sympathy, a kindly encouragement, have
combined to crush me down. They succeeded long. But at last I
venture to hope that I am beating them. Happily, Nature endowed me
with a sanguine, joyous, elastic temperament. He who never despairs
seldom completely fails."
This speech rather perplexed Kenelm, for had not the minstrel declared
that his singing days were over, that he had decided on the
renunciation of verse-making? What other path to fame, from which the
critics had not been able to exclude his steps, was he, then, now
pursuing,--he whom Kenelm had assumed to belong to some commercial
moneymaking firm? No doubt some less difficult prose-track, probably
a novel. Everybody writes novels nowadays, and as the public will
read novels without being told to do so, and will not read poetry
unless they are told that they ought, possibly novels are not quite so
much at the mercy of cliques as are the poems of our Augustan age.
However, Kenelm did not think of seeking for further confidence on
that score. His mind at that moment, not unnaturally, wandered from
books and critics to love and wedlock.
"Our talk," said he, "has digressed into fretful courses; permit me to
return to the starting-point. You are going to settle down into the
peace of home. A peaceful home is like a good conscience. The rains
without do not pierce its roof, the winds without do not shake its
walls. If not an impertinent question, is it long since you have
known your intended bride?"
"Yes, very long."
"And always loved her?"
"Always, from her infancy. Out of all womankind, she was designed to
be my life's playmate and my soul's purifier. I know not what might
have become of me, if the thought of her had not walked beside me as
my guardian angel. For, like many vagrants from the beaten high roads
of the world, there is in my nature something of that lawlessness
which belongs to high animal spirits, to the zest of adventure, and
the warm blood that runs into song, chiefly because song is the voice
of a joy. And no doubt, when I look back on the past years I must own
that I have too often been led astray from the objects set before my
reason, and cherished at my heart, by erring impulse or wanton fancy."
"Petticoat interest, I presume," interposed Kenelm, dryly.
"I wish I could honestly answer 'No,'" said the minstrel, colouring
high. "But from the worst, from all that would have permanently
blasted the career to which I intrust my fortunes, all that would have
rendered me unworthy of the pure love that now, I trust, awaits and
crowns my dreams of happiness, I have been saved by the haunting smile
in a sinless infantine face. Only once was I in great peril,--that
hour of peril I recall with a shudder. It was at Luscombe."
"At Luscombe!"
"In the temptation of a terrible crime I thought I heard a voice say,
'Mischief! Remember the little child.' In that supervention which is
so readily accepted as a divine warning, when the imagination is
morbidly excited, and when the conscience, though lulled asleep for a
moment, is still asleep so lightly that the sigh of a breeze, the fall
of a leaf, can awake it with a start of terror, I took the voice for
that of my guardian angel. Thinking it over later, and coupling the
voice with the moral of those weird lines you repeated to ine so
appositely the next day, I conclude that I am not mistaken when I say
it was from your lips that the voice which preserved me came."
"I confess the impertinence: you pardon it?"
The minstrel seized Kenelm's hand and pressed it earnestly.
"Pardon it! Oh, could you but guess what cause I have to be grateful,
everlastingly grateful! That sudden cry, the remorse and horror of my
own self that it struck into me,--deepened by those rugged lines which
the next day made me shrink in dismay from 'the face of my darling
sin'! Then came the turning-point of my life. From that day, the
lawless vagabond within me was killed. I mean not, indeed, the love
of Nature and of song which had first allured the vagabond, but the
hatred of steadfast habits and of serious work,--/that/ was killed. I
no longer trifled with my calling: I took to it as a serious duty.
And when I saw her, whom fate has reserved and reared for my bride,
her face was no longer in my eyes that of the playful child; the soul
of the woman was dawning into it. It is but two years since that day,
to me so eventful. Yet my fortunes are now secured. And if fame be
not established, I am at last in a position which warrants my saying
to her I love, 'The time has come when, without fear for thy future, I
can ask thee to be mine.'"
The man spoke with so fervent a passion that Kenelm silently left him
to recover his wonted self-possession,--not unwilling to be
silent,--not unwilling, in the softness of the hour, passing from
roseate sunset into starry twilight, to murmur to himself, "And the
time, too, has come for me!"
After a few moments the minstrel resumed lightly and cheerily,--
"Sir, your turn: pray have you long known--judging by our former
conversation you cannot have long loved--the lady whom you have wooed
and won?"
As Kenelm had neither as yet wooed nor won the lady in question, and
did not deem it necessary to enter into any details on the subject of
love particular to himself, he replied by a general observation,--
"It seems to me that the coming of love is like the coming of spring:
the date is not to be reckoned by the calendar. It may be slow and
gradual; it may be quick and sudden. But in the morning, when we wake
and recognize a change in the world without, verdure on the trees,
blossoms on the sward, warmth in the sunshine, music in the air, then
we say Spring has come!"
"I like your illustration. And if it be an idle question to ask a
lover how long he has known the beloved one, so it is almost as idle
to ask if she be not beautiful. He cannot but see in her face the
beauty she has given to the world without."
"True; and that thought is poetic enough to make me remind you that I
favoured you with the maiden specimen of my verse-making on condition
that you repaid me by a specimen of your own practical skill in the
art. And I claim the right to suggest the theme. Let it be--"
"Of a beefsteak?"
"Tush, you have worn out that tasteless joke at my expense. The theme
must be of love, and if you could improvise a stanza or two expressive
of the idea you just uttered I shall listen with yet more pleased
attention."
"Alas! I am no /improvisatore/. Yet I will avenge myself on your
former neglect of my craft by chanting to you a trifle somewhat in
unison with the thought you ask me to versify, but which you would not
stay to hear at Tor Hadham (though you did drop a shilling into Max's
tray); it was one of the songs I sang that evening, and it was not
ill-received by my humble audience.
"THE BEAUTY OF THE MISTRESS IS IN THE LOVER'S EYE.
"Is she not pretty, my Mabel May?
Nobody ever yet called her so.
Are not her lineaments faultless, say?
If I must answer you plainly, No.
"Joy to believe that the maid I love
None but myself as she is can see;
Joy that she steals from her heaven above,
And is only revealed on this earth to me!"
As soon as he had finished this very artless ditty, the minstrel rose
and said,--
"Now I must bid you good-by. My way lies through those meadows, and
yours no doubt along the high road."
"Not so. Permit me to accompany you. I have a lodging not far from
hence, to which the path through the fields is the shortest way."
The minstrel turned a somewhat surprised and somewhat inquisitive look
towards Kenelm. But feeling, perhaps, that having withheld from his
fellow-traveller all confidence as to his own name and attributes, he
had no right to ask any confidence from that gentleman not voluntarily
made to him, he courteously said "that he wished the way were longer,
since it would be so pleasantly halved," and strode forth at a brisk
pace.
The twilight was now closing into the brightness of a starry summer
night, and the solitude of the fields was unbroken. Both these men,
walking side by side, felt supremely happy. But happiness is like
wine; its effect differing with the differing temperaments on which it
acts. In this case garrulous and somewhat vaunting with the one man,
warm-coloured, sensuous, impressionable to the influences of external
Nature, as an Aeolian harp to the rise or fall of a passing wind; and,
with the other man, taciturn and somewhat modestly expressed,
saturnine, meditative, not indeed dull to the influences of external
Nature, but deeming them of no value, save where they passed out of
the domain of the sensuous into that of the intellectual, and the soul
of man dictated to the soulless Nature its own questions and its own
replies.
The minstrel took the talk on himself, and the talk charmed his
listener. It became so really eloquent in the tones of its utterance,
in the frank play of its delivery, that I could no more adequately
describe it than a reporter, however faithful to every word a true
orator may say, can describe that which, apart from all words, belongs
to the presence of the orator himself.
Not, then, venturing to report the language of this singular
itinerant, I content myself with saying that the substance of it was
of the nature on which it is said most men can be eloquent: it was
personal to himself. He spoke of aspirations towards the achievement
of a name, dating back to the dawn of memory; of early obstacles in
lowly birth, stinted fortunes; of a sudden opening to his ambition
while yet in boyhood, through the generous favour of a rich man, who
said, "The child has genius: I will give it the discipline of culture;
one day it shall repay to the world what it owes to me;" of studies
passionately begun, earnestly pursued, and mournfully suspended in
early youth. He did not say how or wherefore: he rushed on to dwell
upon the struggles for a livelihood for himself and those dependent on
him; how in such struggles he was compelled to divert toil and energy
from the systematic pursuit of the object he had once set before him;
the necessities for money were too urgent to be postponed to the
visions of fame. "But even," he exclaimed, passionately, "even in
such hasty and crude manifestations of what is within me, as
circumstances limited my powers, I know that I ought to have found
from those who profess to be authoritative judges the encouragement of
praise. How much better, then, I should have done if I had found it!
How a little praise warms out of a man the good that is in him, and
the sneer of a contempt which he feels to be unjust chills the ardour
to excel! However, I forced my way, so far as was then most essential
to me, the sufficing breadmaker for those I loved; and in my holidays
of song and ramble I found a delight that atoned for all the rest.
But still the desire of fame, once conceived in childhood, once
nourished through youth, never dies but in our grave. Foot and hoof
may tread it down, bud, leaf, stalk; its root is too deep below the
surface for them to reach, and year after year stalk and leaf and bud
re-emerge. Love may depart from our mortal life: we console
ourselves; the beloved will be reunited to us in the life to come.
But if he who sets his heart on fame loses it in this life, what can
console him?"
"Did you not say a little while ago that fame allowed of no grave?"
"True; but if we do not achieve it before we ourselves are in the
grave, what comfort can it give to us? Love ascends to heaven, to
which we hope ourselves to ascend; but fame remains on the earth,
which we shall never again revisit. And it is because fame is
earth-born that the desire for it is the most lasting, the regret for
the want of it the most bitter, to the child of earth. But I shall
achieve it now; it is already in my grasp."
By this time the travellers had arrived at the brook, facing the
wooden bridge beside Cromwell Lodge.
Here the minstrel halted; and Kenelm with a certain tremble in his
voice, said, "Is it not time that we should make ourselves known to
each other by name? I have no longer any cause to conceal mine,
indeed I never had any cause stronger than whim,--Kenelm Chillingly,
the only son of Sir Peter, of Exmundham, -----shire."
"I wish your father joy of so clever a son," said the minstrel with
his wonted urbanity. "You already know enough of me to be aware that
I am of much humbler birth and station than you; but if you chance to
have visited the exhibition of the Royal Academy this year--ah! I
understand that start--you might have recognized a picture of which
you have seen the rudimentary sketch, 'The Girl with the Flower-ball,'
one of three pictures very severely handled by 'The Londoner,' but, in
spite of that potent enemy, insuring fortune and promising fame to the
wandering minstrel, whose name, if the sight of the pictures had
induced you to inquire into that, you would have found to be Walter
Melville. Next January I hope, thanks to that picture, to add,
'Associate of the Royal Academy.' The public will not let them keep
me out of it, in spite of 'The Londoner.' You are probably an
expected guest at one of the more imposing villas from which we see
the distant lights. I am going to a very humble cottage, in which
henceforth I hope to find my established home. I am there now only
for a few days, but pray let me welcome you there before I leave. The
cottage is called Grasmere."