by the largest interpretation be called music, I
welcomed and was thankful; for even "five-finger exercises" I found, at
moments, better than nothing. For it was when I was labouring at my desk
that the notes of the instrument were grateful and helpful to me. Some
men, I believe, would have been driven frantic under the circumstances;
to me, anything like a musical sound always came as a godsend; it tuned
my thoughts; it made the words flow. Even the street organs put me in a
happy mood; I owe many a page to them--written when I should else have
been sunk in bilious gloom.

More than once, too, when I was walking London streets by night,
penniless and miserable, music from an open window has stayed my step,
even as yesterday. Very well can I remember such a moment in Eaton
Square, one night when I was going back to Chelsea, tired, hungry, racked
by frustrate passions. I had tramped miles and miles, in the hope of
wearying myself so that I could sleep and forget. Then came the piano
notes--I saw that there was festival in the house--and for an hour or so
I revelled as none of the bidden guests could possibly be doing. And
when I reached my poor lodgings, I was no longer envious nor mad with
desires, but as I fell asleep I thanked the unknown mortal who had played
for me, and given me peace.

XXVII.

To-day I have read _The Tempest_. It is perhaps the play that I love
best, and, because I seem to myself to know it so well, I commonly pass
it over in opening the book. Yet, as always in regard to Shakespeare,
having read it once more, I find that my knowledge was less complete than
I supposed. So it would be, live as long as one might; so it would ever
be, whilst one had strength to turn the pages and a mind left to read
them.

I like to believe that this was the poet's last work, that he wrote it in
his home at Stratford, walking day by day in the fields which had taught
his boyhood to love rural England. It is ripe fruit of the supreme
imagination, perfect craft of the master hand. For a man whose life's
business it has been to study the English tongue, what joy can equal that
of marking the happy ease wherewith Shakespeare surpasses, in mere
command of words, every achievement of those even who, apart from him,
are great? I could fancy that, in _The Tempest_, he wrought with a
peculiar consciousness of this power, smiling as the word of inimitable
felicity, the phrase of incomparable cadence, was