som of the miser,
consideration detects the poet in the full tide of life, with more,
indeed, of the poetic fire than usually goes to epics; and tracing that
mean man about his cold hearth, and to and fro in his discomfortable
house, spies within him a blazing bonfire of delight. And so with
others, who do not live by bread alone, but by some cherished and
perhaps fantastic pleasure; who are meat salesmen to the external eye,
and possibly to themselves are Shakespeares, Napoleons, or Beethovens;
who have not one virtue to rub against another in the field of active
life, and yet perhaps, in the life of contemplation, sit with the
saints. We see them on the street, and we can count their buttons; but
heaven knows in what they pride themselves! heaven knows where they have
set their treasure!

There is one fable that touches very near the quick of life: the fable
of the monk who passed into the woods, heard a bird break into song,
hearkened for a trill or two, and found himself on his return a stranger
at his convent gates; for he had been absent fifty years, and of all his
comrades there survived but one to recognise him. It is not only in the
woods that this enchanter carols, though perhaps he is native there. He
sings in the most doleful places. The miser hears him and chuckles, and
the days are moments. With no more apparatus than an ill-smelling
lantern I have evoked him on the naked links. All life that is not
merely mechanical is spun out of two strands: seeking for that bird and
hearing him. And it is just this that makes life so hard to value, and
the delight of each so incommunicable; and just a knowledge of this, and
a remembrance of those fortunate hours in which the bird has sung to us,
that fills us with such wonder when we turn the pages of the realist.
There, to be sure, we find a picture of life in so far as it consists of
mud and of old iron, cheap desires and cheap fears, that which we are
ashamed to remember and that which we are careless whether we forget;
but of the note of that time-devouring nightingale we hear no news.

The case of these writers of romance is most obscure. They have been
boys and youths; they have lingered outside the window of the beloved,
who was then most probably writing to some one else; they have sat
before a sheet of paper, and felt themselves mere continents of
congested poetry, not one line of which would flow; they have walked
alone in the woods, they have walked in citi