out to him in the
street, was one he never forgot; nor in after years did he ever
encounter that transfigured contributor without an involuntary
recurrence of that old feeling of awe. No subsequent acquaintance with
editorial rooms ever led him into materialistic explanations of that
enchanted piece of work--a newspaper. The editors might do their
best--and succeed surprisingly--in looking like ordinary mortals, you
might even know the leader-writers, and, with the very public, gaze
through gratings into the subterranean printing-rooms,--the mystery none
the less remained. No exposure of editorial staffs or other machinery
could destroy the sense of enchantment, as no amount of anatomy or
biology can destroy the mystery of the human miracle.

So I suppose Nature first makes us in love with the tools we are to use,
long before we have a thought upon what we shall use them. Perhaps the
first desire of the born writer is to be a compositor. Out of the love
of mere type quickly evolves a love of mere words for their own sake;
but whether we shall make use of them as a historian, novelist,
philosopher, or poet, is a secondary consideration, a mere afterthought.
To Henry Mesurier had already come the time when the face of life began
to Wear a certain aspect, the peculiar attraction of which for himself
he longed to fix, a certain mystical importance attaching to the
commonest every-day objects and circumstances, a certain ecstatic
quality in the simplest experiences; but even so far as it had been
revealed, this dawning vision of the world seemed only to have come to
him, not so much to find expression, as to mock him with his childish
incapacity adequately to use the very tools he loved. He would hang for
hours over some scene in nature, caught in a woodland spell, like a
nympholept of old; but when he tried to put in words what he had seen,
what a poor piece of ornamental gardening the thing was! There were
trees and birds and grass, to be sure; but there was nothing of that
meaning look which they had worn, that look of being tiptoe with
revelation which is one of the most fascinating tricks of the visible
world, and which even a harsh town full of chimneys can sometimes take
on when seen in given moments and lights. And it was astonishing to see
into what lifeless imitative verse his most original and passionate
moments could be transformed.

Still some unreasonably indulgent spirit of the air, that had evidently
not re