a letter will find me. If our last night was a
real thing, we shall meet again, never fear.' With some such words as
those it was that he bade us good-bye.

Of course, letters found all three of us before a fortnight had gone
by, and in but a short time we found his home. There it is that George
should be seen. Away he is full of precious light, but home is his
setting. To Narcissus, who found it in that green period when all
youngsters take vehement vows of celibacy, and talk much of 'free love,'
all ignorant, one is in charity persuaded, of what they quite mean, that
home was certainly as great and lasting a revelation as the first hour
of 'Poetry's divine first finger-touch.' It was not that his own
home-life had been unhappy, for it was the reverse, and rich indeed in
great and sweet influences; but it was rather, I think, that the ideal
of a home is not so easily to be reached from that home in which one is
a child, where one is too apt to miss the whole in consideration of
one's own part in it, as from another on which we can look from the
outside.

Our parents, even to the end, partake too much of the nature of
mythology; it always needs an effort to imagine them beings with quite
the same needs and dreams as ourselves. We rarely get a glimpse of
their poetry, for the very reason that we ourselves are factors in it,
and are, therefore, too apt to dwell on the less happy details of the
domestic life, details which one ray of their poetry would transfigure
as the sun transfigures the motes in his beam. Thus, in that green age I
spoke of, one's sickly vision can but see the dusty, world-worn side of
domesticity, the petty daily cares of living, the machinery, so to say,
of 'house and home.' But when one stands in another home, where these
are necessarily unseen by us, stands with the young husband, the
poetry-maker, how different it all seems. One sees the creation bloom
upon it; one ceases to blaspheme, and learns to bless. Later, when at
length one understands why it is sweeter to say 'wife' than
'sweetheart,' how even one may be reconciled to calling one's Daffodilia
'little mother'--because of the children, you know; it would never do
for them to say Daffodilia--then he will understand too how those petty
details, formerly so '_banal_,' are, after all, but notes in the music,
and what poetry can flicker, like its own blue flame, around even the
joint purchase of a frying-pan.

That Narcissus ever understood