ere dumb to her. The "cinque spotted cowslip
bells" brought only thoughts of wine to her. When he was watching
"certain stars shoot madly from their spheres," she most likely was
grumbling at him for mooning there after curfew bell. When he was
learning Nature's lore in "the fresh cup of the crimson rose," she was
dinning in his ear that Hammet and Judith wanted worsted socks. When he
was listening in fancy to the "sea-maid's song," and weaving thoughts to
which a world still stands reverentially to listen, she was buzzing
behind him, and bidding him go card the wool, and weeping that, in her
girlhood, she had not chosen some rich glover or ale-taster, instead of
idle, useless, wayward Willie Shakespeare. Poor fellow! He did not
write, I would swear, without fellow-feeling, and yearning over souls
similarly shipwrecked, that wise saw, "A young man married is a man
that's marred."

_PASCAREL._

When a man's eyes meet yours, and his faith trusts you, and his heart
upon a vague impulse is laid bare to you, it always has seemed to me the
basest treachery the world can hold to pass the gold of confidence which
he pours out to you from hand to hand as common coin for common
circulation.

* * *

Circumstance is so odd and so cruel a thing. It is wholly apart from
talent.

Genius will do so little for a man if he do not know how to seize or
seduce opportunity. No doubt, in his youth, Ambrogio had been shy,
silent, out of his art timid, and in his person ungraceful, and
unlovely. So the world had passed by him turning a deaf ear to his
melodies, and he had let it pass, because he had not that splendid
audacity to grasp it perforce, and hold it until it blessed him, without
which no genius will ever gain the benediction of the Angel of Fame.

Which is a fallen Angel, no doubt; but still, perhaps, the spirit most
worth wrestling with after all; since wrestle we must in this world, if
we do not care to lie down and form a pavement for other men's cars of
triumph, as the Assyrians of old stretched themselves on their faces
before the coming of the chariot of their kings.

* * *

One of the saddest things perhaps in all the sadness of this world is
the frightful loss at which so much of the best and strongest work of a
man's life has to be thrown away at the onset. If you desire a name
amongst men, you must buy the crown of it at such a costly price!

True, the price will in t