lyric.

To read just that passage, and the phrase _the bright plane of a
brimming harbour_, is one of those "rare and sensational
delights" that set the mind moving on lovely journeys of its own,
and mark off visits to a bookshop not as casual errands of
reason, but as necessary acts of devotion. We visit bookshops not
so often to buy any one special book, but rather to rediscover,
in the happier and more expressive words of others, our own
encumbered soul.

A DISCOVERY

[Illustration]

We are going to tell the truth. It has been on our mind for some
time. We are going to tell it exactly, without any balancing or
trimming or crimped edges. We are weary of talking about
trivialities and are going to come plump and plain to the
adventures of our own mind. These are real adventures, just as
real as the things we see. The green frog that took refuge on our
porch last night was no more real. Perhaps frogs don't care so
much for wet as they are supposed to, for when that excellent
thunderstorm came along and the ceiling of the night was sheeted
with lilac brightness, through which ran quivering threads of
naked fire (not just the soft, tame, flabby fire of the domestic
hearth, but the real core and marrow of flame, its hungry,
terrible, destroying self), our friend the frog came hopping up
on the porch where we stood, apparently to take shelter. How
brilliant was his black and silver eye when we picked him up! His
direct and honourable regard somehow made us feel ashamed, we
know not why. And yet we have plenty to be ashamed about--but how
did he know? He was still on the porch this morning. Equally real
was the catbird on the hedge as we came down toward the station.
She--we call her so, for there was unmistakable ladyhood in her
delicately tailored trimness--she bickered at us in a cheerful
way, on top of those bushes which were so loaded with the night's
rainfall that they shone a blurred cobweb gray in the lifting
light. Her eye was also dark and polished and lucid, like a bead
of ink. It also had the same effect of tribulation on our spirit.
Neither the catbird nor the frog, we said to ourself, would have
tormented their souls trying to "invent" something to write
about. They would have told what happened to them, and let it go
at that. So, as we walked along under an arcade of maple trees,
admiring the little green seed-biplanes brought down by the
thrash of the rain--they look rather as though they w