Or shredded perfume, like a cloud
From closet long to quiet vowed,
With mothed and dropping arras hung,
Mouldering her lute and books among,
As when a queen, long dead, was young."

If his sense of overwhelming defeat made for despair, he was conscious
of his nature being effectively appealed to from another direction. If
he had that evening determined to throttle his ambition and write
poetry no more, he seemed to have become aware of the stirring of a
new motive for existence. But what it was he could not definitely tell
himself.

And always before him rose the figure of the scented serpent-woman
holding his letter in her long fingers, her white teeth gleaming in
mockery!

"I shall live--live!" he exclaimed, as he entered his own door at
last.

He lighted the gas in his large, comfortable sitting-room, and noticed
there were letters for him on the mantel resting against the clock,
whose hands pointed to half-past two.

But he would not look at them just yet. His was a strange mood just
then and he did not wish his thoughts disturbed. There was something
he had to do at once. Let the letters wait till he had finished.

Again he heard Ingram's voice reading. Every word had branded itself
on him.

Soon he had the large table littered with bundles of manuscript. They
represented his poetic output. Many of them had travelled far and
wide; never again should they be sent forth into the world to bring
him that which his heart had most desired. He took up one here and
there and ran his eye through it. Considering the years he had worked,
the output--for a young man's muse--was perhaps not large. But then he
had only taken up his pen when inspiration had come. Certainly during
the earlier years most of his time had been spent in reading and
study. Otherwise he had had a habit of losing himself in the play of
his imagination, awaking after having lived in worlds innumerable.
Thus the actual amount of verse he had produced in the first years was
really quite small.

He could not help dawdling a little before proceeding with the work of
destruction. They were strange products, most of these poems of his;
mirroring vague metaphysical moods, unseizable mystic fancies;
incomprehensible save to one whose own inwardness they suggested, or
to one of infinite emotional sympathy. A blurred, shapeless spirit
brooded behind these melodious masses of words, these outpourings of
disconnected ideas