loser
familiarity with them might very possibly have destroyed.

The effect on myself of such influences was presently betrayed by the
fact that poetry, as understood by Pope, no longer satisfied me. I
gradually submitted to the dominion of Keats, Browning, and Matthew
Arnold. Even at Denbury, in my most conservative days, I had so far
escaped from the atmosphere of Pope's Pastorals that I had described a
beautiful valley in which I would often sequester myself as a place--

Where no man's voice, or any voice makes stir,
Save sometimes through the leafy loneliness
The long loose laugh of the wild woodpecker.

One of my fellow pupils, whose youth had an air of manhood, and who
played with much expression on the cornet, confided to me, on returning
from a summer holiday, his adventures on the Lake of Como, where,
resting on his oars, he had agitated with his musical notes the pulses
of a fair companion. "Now there," he said, "you have something which, if
you tried, you might manage to make a verse about." I tried, and the
result was this:

The stars are o'er our heads in hollow skies,
In hollow skies the stars beneath our boat,
Between the stars of two infinities
Midway upon a gleaming film we float.

My lips are on the sounding horn;
The sounding horn with music fills.
Faint echoes backward from the world are born,
Tongued by yon distant zone of slumbering hills.

The world spreads wide on every side,
But cold and dark it seems to me.
What care I on this charmed tide
For aught save those far stars and thee?

I accomplished, however, such feats of imagination, not on my friend's
behalf only, but on my own also. Readers of _Martin Chuzzlewhit_ will
remember how "Baily Junior," who was once bootboy at Mrs. Todger's
boarding-house, imagined that Mrs. Gamp was in love with him, and that
her life was blighted by the suspicion that such a passion was hopeless.
I, in common with other imaginative boys, was frequently beatified by
the magic of a not unlike illusion. My practical hopes for the future,
so far as I troubled to form any, were to enter the diplomatic service
as soon as I left Oxford, and it seemed to me that this or that
distinguished and beautiful lady, old enough to be my mother, would
meanwhile be blighted by some hopeless passion for myself, or
else--what, in my opinion, was a still more exciting alternative--that I
should, like