e that he had expected to meet Carinthia again at the Baths.
Her absence dealt a violent shock to the aerial structure he dwelt in;
for though his ardour for the life of the solitudes was unfeigned, as
was his calm overlooking of social distinctions, the self-indulgent
dreamer became troubled with an alarming sentience, that for him to
share the passions of the world of men was to risk the falling lower
than most. Women are a cause of dreams, but they are dreaded enemies of
his kind of dream, deadly enemies of the immaterial dreamers; and should
one of them be taken on board a vessel of the vapourish texture young
Woodseer sailed in above the clouds lightly while he was in it alone,
questions of past, future, and present, the three weights upon humanity,
bear it down, and she must go, or the vessel sinks. And cast out of it,
what was he? The asking exposed him to the steadiest wind the civilized
world is known to blow. From merely thinking upon one of the daughters
of earth, he was made to feel his position in that world, though he
refused to understand it, and assisted by two days of hard walking he
reduced Carinthia to an abstract enthusiasm, no very serious burden. His
note-book sustained it easily. He wrote her name in simple fondness
of the name; a verse, and hints for more, and some sentences, which he
thought profound. They were composed as he sat by the roadway, on the
top of hills, and in a boat crossing a dark green lake deep under wooded
mountain walls: things of priceless value.

It happened, that midway on the lake he perceived his boatman about to
prime a pistol to murder the mild-eyed stillness, and he called to the
man in his best German to desist. During the altercation, there passed
a countryman of his in another of the punts, who said gravely: 'I
thank you for that.' It was early morning, and they had the lake to
themselves, each deeming the other an intruder; for the courtship of
solitude wanes when we are haunted by a second person in pursuit of it;
he is discolouring matter in our pure crystal cup. Such is the worship
of the picturesque; and it would appear to say, that the spirit of man
finds itself yet in the society of barbarians. The case admits of good
pleading either way, even upon the issue whether the exclusive or the
vulgar be the more barbarous. But in those days the solicitation of the
picturesque had been revived by a poet of some impassioned rhetoric, and
two devotees could hardly meet,