iage, five years,
fourteen years as Tennyson had waited, rather than that he should make
the monstrous surrender he had been so near to making. At least he would
put himself and his work to the test, and in a year he would be able to
publish his first volume of poems. Perhaps his father would realize then
that he deserved to marry Pauline. After all, they were together; there
were maddening restrictions, of course, but they were together. This
visit to Ladingford Manor must be accepted as an omen to persevere in
his original intention; for he had been granted the vision of a
perfected beauty, which he knew, by reading the lives of the men who
made it, had only been achieved after desperate struggles and
disappointments. This enchanted time on the _Naiad_ must be the
anticipated reward of a tremendous industry when he got back to
Wychford. He would no more break the rules and fret at the restrictions
made for him and Pauline. Every hour when they were together should
henceforth be doubled in the intensity of its capacity for being
enjoyed. One thing only he would demand, that in August they should be
formally and openly engaged. Otherwise when Autumn came and made it
impossible to go on the river, they would be kept to the Rectory; and
the few hours of her company he would have must at least be free. He
would talk to Margaret about it, so that she might use her influence to
procure this favor. Then he would write and tell his father. All would
be easy; Ladingford had inspired him. He beheld the visit in retrospect
more and more clearly as an exhortation to endure against whatever the
world should offer him to betray his ambition. Yet was Pauline the
world? No, certainly Pauline had no kinship with the world, and
therefore he was the more straitly bound to disregard the voice of
material prosperity. She had joked about herself as a Mrs. Lambert of
the future; but behind the lightness of her jest had stood confidence in
himself and in his fame. Should he imprison that spirit of mirth and
fire in the husk of a schoolmaster's wife?

The second week passed; the time at Ladingford was over, and early in
the morning they must start for the journey of thirty miles down to
Oxford. The dapple-gray horse that would tow the barge was already
arrived, and now stood munching the long grass in the shade of the
bridge; the swallows were high in the golden air of the afternoon; the
long-purples on the banks of the young river seemed to a