possible till the
last line of it was written, and he had learnt patience, the art of
sighing and putting the fine scheme away in the pigeon-hole of what could
never be. But to think of those days! Then one could plot out a book that
should be more curious than Rabelais, and jot down the outlines of a
romance to surpass Cervantes, and design renaissance tragedies and
volumes of _contes_, and comedies of the Restoration; everything was to
be done, and the masterpiece was always the rainbow cup, a little way
before him.

He touched the manuscript on the desk, and the feeling of the pages
seemed to restore all the papers that had been torn so long ago. It was
the atmosphere of the silent room that returned, the light of the shaded
candle falling on the abandoned leaves. This had been painfully
excogitated while the snowstorm whirled about the lawn and filled the
lanes, this was of the summer night, this of the harvest moon rising
like a fire from the tithebarn on the hill. How well he remembered those
half-dozen pages of which he had once been so proud; he had thought out
the sentences one evening, while he leaned on the foot-bridge and watched
the brook swim across the road. Every word smelt of the meadowsweet that
grew thick upon the banks; now, as he recalled the cadence and the phrase
that had seemed so charming, he saw again the ferns beneath the vaulted
roots of the beech, and the green light of the glowworm in the hedge.

And in the west the mountains swelled to a great dome, and on the dome
was a mound, the memorial of some forgotten race, that grew dark and
large against the red sky, when the sun set. He had lingered below it in
the solitude, amongst the winds, at evening, far away from home; and oh,
the labor and the vain efforts to make the form of it and the awe of it
in prose, to write the hush of the vast hill, and the sadness of the
world below sinking into the night, and the mystery, the suggestion of
the rounded hillock, huge against the magic sky.

He had tried to sing in words the music that the brook sang, and the
sound of the October wind rustling through the brown bracken on the hill.
How many pages he had covered in the effort to show a white winter world,
a sun without warmth in a grey-blue sky, all the fields, all the land
white and shining, and one high summit where the dark pines towered,
still in the still afternoon, in the pale violet air.

To win the secret of words, to make a phrase that w