bers where
they had lain so long in silent state, and smiled with their olden
grace. Shades of nameless poets, who had wrought their souls into a
cathedral and died unknown and unhonored, passed before the dreaming
boy, and claimed their immortality. Nay, once the Blessed Face shone
through the cloistered twilight, and the Twelve stood roundabout. In
this strange solitude and stranger companionship many an old problem
untwined its Gordian knot, and whispered along its loosened length,--

"I give you the end of a golden string:
Only wind it into a ball,
It will lead you in at Heaven's gate,
Built in Jerusalem wall."

To an engraving of "Joseph of Arimathea among the Rocks of Albion,"
executed at this time, he appends,--"This is one of the Gothic artists
who built the Cathedrals in what we call the Dark Ages, wandering about
in sheepskins and goatskins; of whom the world was not worthy. Such were
the Christians in all ages."

Yet, somewhere, through mediaeval gloom and modern din, another spirit
breathed upon him,--a spirit of green woods and blue waters, the
freshness of May mornings, the prattle of tender infancy, the gambols of
young lambs on the hill-side. From his childhood, Poetry walked hand in
hand with Painting, and beguiled his loneliness with wild, sweet
harmonies. Bred up amid the stately, measured, melodious platitudes of
the eighteenth century, that Golden Age of commonplace, he struck down
through them all with simple, untaught, unconscious directness, and
smote the spring of ever-living waters. Such wood-notes wild as trill in
Shakspeare's verse sprang from the stricken chords beneath his hand. The
little singing-birds that seem almost to have leaped unbidden into life
among the gross creations of those old Afreets who

"Stood around the throne of Shakspeare,
Sturdy, but unclean,"

carolled their clear, pure lays to him, and left a quivering echo. Fine,
fleeting fantasies we have, a tender, heartfelt, heart-reaching pathos,
laughter that might at any moment tremble into tears, eternal truths,
draped in the garb of quaint and simple story, solemn fervors, subtile
sympathies, and the winsomeness of little children at their
play,--sometimes glowing with the deepest color, often just tinged to
the pale and changing hues of a dream, but touched with such coy grace,
modulated to such free, wild rhythm, suffused with such a delicate,
evanishing loveliness, that they seem scarcely to be the