ity, the crowded,
self-seeking, hypocritical world had encompassed him from youth, robbed
him of privacy, cheated him of that repose which brings a man to a
knowledge of himself, and despoils him of those sweet and
tranquillising memories which grow out of a quiet childhood as the wild
flowers spring along the edges of the woods.

Coming, one from the stillness of a solitary island and the other from
the roar and rush of a court and a city, these two met, and there
flashed from one to the other that sudden and thrilling intelligence
which on the instant gives life a new interpretation and the world an
all-conquering loveliness. Nowhere, surely, has the eternal romance
found more significant setting than on this magical island, about which
sea and sky, day and night, weave and weave again those vanishing webs
of splendour in which day-break and evening stars are snared; with such
music throbbing on the air as invisible spirits make when the command
of the master is on them! Here, surely, was the home of this drama of
the soul, the acting of which on the troubled stage of life is a
perpetual appeal to faith and hope and joy! For youth and love are
shining words in the vocabulary of the Imagination--words which contain
the deepest of present and predict the sweetest of future happiness.
So deeply interwoven is the real significance of these words with the
Imagination that, separated from it, they lose all their magical glow
and beauty. Youth moves in no narrow territory; its boundary lines
fade out into infinity. It feels no iron hand of limitation; it
discerns no impassable wall of restriction. Life stretches away before
and about it limitless as space and full of unseen splendours as the
stars that crowd and brighten it. The great wings of hope, unbruised
yet by any beatings of the later tempests, shine through the air,
lustrous and tireless, as if all flights were possible. And far off,
on the remote horizon lines where sight fails, the mirage of dreams
dissolves and reappears in a thousand alluring forms.

Love knows even less of limitation and infirmity. Its eyes, sometimes
oblivious of the things most obvious, pierce the remotest future, read
the innermost soul, discern the last and highest fruitions. The seed
in its hand, hard, black, unbroken, is already a flower to its thought;
out of the bare, stern facts of the present its magical touch brings
one knows not what of joy and loveliness. And when youth