and
married his mother. But when Oedipus commits those unhappy mistakes
nobody is shocked. Oxford in the nineteenth century is a long way off
from Thebes three thousand or four thousand years ago.

"And," continued Kenelm, plunging deeper into the maze of metaphysical
criticism, "even where the poet deals with persons and things close upon
our daily sight,--if he would give them poetic charm he must resort to
a sort of moral or psychological distance; the nearer they are to us
in external circumstance, the farther they must be in some internal
peculiarities. Werter and Clarissa Harlowe are described as
contemporaries of their artistic creation, and with the minutest details
of apparent realism; yet they are at once removed from our daily lives
by their idiosyncrasies and their fates. We know that while Werter
and Clarissa are so near to us in much that we sympathize with them as
friends and kinsfolk, they are yet as much remote from us in the poetic
and idealized side of their natures as if they belonged to the age of
Homer; and this it is that invests with charm the very pain which their
fate inflicts on us. Thus, I suppose, it must be in love. If the love
we feel is to have the glamour of poetry, it must be love for some
one morally at a distance from our ordinary habitual selves; in short,
differing from us in attributes which, however near we draw to the
possessor, we can never approach, never blend, in attributes of our
own; so that there is something in the loved one that always remains an
ideal,--a mystery,--'a sun-bright summit mingling with the sky'!"

Herewith the soliloquist's musings glided vaguely into mere revery. He
closed his eyes drowsily, not asleep, nor yet quite awake; as sometimes
in bright summer days when we recline on the grass we do close our eyes,
and yet dimly recognize a golden light bathing the drowsy lids; and
athwart that light images come and go like dreams, though we know that
we are not dreaming.

CHAPTER V.

FROM this state, half comatose, half unconscious, Kenelm was roused
slowly, reluctantly. Something struck softly on his cheek,--again a
little less softly; he opened his eyes, they fell first upon two tiny
rosebuds, which, on striking his face, had fallen on his breast; and
then looking up, he saw before him, in an opening of the trellised
circle, a female child's laughing face. Her hand was still uplifted
charged with another rosebud, but behind the child's figure, lookin