--a spirit invisible for reason and responsive only
to divination, as love responds to love. Sometimes it was hidden amid
a flow of sensuous images; sometimes in an impression of a landscape,
of an atmospheric effect, of a play of light and shade. Such
impression was never pure and complete, such visual effect never
pictured for its own sake; for here and there amid it would lurk a
phrase that was not of it, that struck a note--an elusive
key-note--which set vibrating something haunting in its familiarity,
terrifying in its strangeness; something mocking and meaningless, that
went echoing away into the infinite.

He had not been able to find contentment in the mere presentation of
beauty. Even where he dealt with the concrete there was always
something to destroy the semblance of reality. The world that was
revealed to his vision was a surface-world, for he had not pierced it
by experience, but only dimly through the medium of books, and the
elements it gave him he used freely. But his combinations of them
were seldom along the lines of the possible. Here a colour would flash
out at one; there a jewel would sparkle; now a perfume would be
wafted; now a bird would sing. But all this individual definiteness
was merged into a general blur, or formed itself into a sort of
kaleidoscopic pattern that subtly suggested a meaning to be seized.

And all that Morgan now looked over again gave back to him the spirit
he had put into them. The gaps in his expression of that spirit he was
blind to. Shaped in the mould of his peculiar fantasy, these poems
lived for the mind that had created them, that had been compelled by
its own inner necessity to give them what was to him their particular
form, to others their very formlessness.

His belief that this poetry was of immortal quality was unshaken, but
he had been born into a wrong world, he now told himself. He was aware
that he did not know the world of every-day affairs; that he was not
fitted to know it. The very thought of its swirling incomprehensible
activities turned him giddy; and if he walked amid it daily it was for
him pure visual perception. Beyond that perception he did not seek to
look and so he escaped discomfort.

Well, let him not linger. His old life--the singer's life--was over,
and nothing of it must remain.

The grate was a big one, but even then the work of destruction would
take some time. A fire had been laid that morning, but had not been
lighted. He put