o
song, hearkened for a trill or two, and found himself at 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 recognize 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 his days are moments. With no more apparatus than an
evil-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 it is 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
to 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."

... "Say that we came [in such a realistic romance] on some such business
as that of my lantern-bearers on the links, and described the boys as
very cold, spat upon by flurries of rain, and drearily surrounded, all
of which they were; and their talk as silly and indecent, which it
certainly was. To the eye of the observer they _are_ wet and cold and
drearily surrounded; but ask themselves, and they are in the heaven of a
recondite pleasure, the ground of which is an ill-smelling lantern."

"For, to repeat, the ground of a man's joy is often hard to hit. It may
hinge at times upon a mere accessory, like the lantern; it may reside in
the mysterious inwards of psychology.... It has so little bond with
externals ... that it may even touch them not, and the man's true life,
for which he consents to live, lie together in the field of fancy.... In
such a case the poetry runs underground. The observer (poor soul, with
his documents!) is all abroad. For to look at the man is but to court
deception. We shall see the trunk from which he draws his nourishment;
but he himself is above and abroad in the green dome of foliage, hummed
through by winds and nested in by nightingales. And the true realism
were that of the poets, to climb after him like a squirrel, and catch
some glimpse of the heave