s--three
winters--till, weary of wandering, I began to ask myself "what next?" My
old passion for books had, in the meantime, re-asserted itself, and I
longed once more for quiet. I knew not that my pilgrimage was hopeless.
I know that I loved her ever; that I could never forget her; that
although the first pangs were past, I yet must bear

"All the aching of heart, the restless, unsatisfied longing,
All the dull, deep pain, and constant anguish of patience!"

I reasoned with myself. I resolved to be stronger--at all events, to be
calmer. Exhausted and world-worn, I turned in thought to my native
village among the green hills, to my deserted home, and the great
solitary study with its busts and bookshelves, and its vista of
neglected garden. The rooms where my mother died; where my father wrote;
where, as a boy, I dreamed and studied, would at least have memories
for me.

Perhaps, silently underlying all these motives, I may at this time
already have begun to entertain one other project which was not so much
a motive as a hope--not so much a hope as a half-seen possibility. I had
written verses from time to time all my life long, and of late they had
come to me more abundantly than ever. They flowed in upon me at times
like an irresistible tide; at others they ebbed away for weeks, and
seemed as if gone for ever. It was a power over which I had no control,
and sought to have none. I never tried to make verses; but, when
the inspiration was upon me, I made them, as it were, in spite of
myself. My desk was full of them in time--sonnets, scraps of songs,
fragments of blank verse, attempts in all sorts of queer and rugged
metres--hexameters, pentameters, alcaics, and the like; with, here and
there, a dialogue out of an imaginary tragedy, or a translation from
some Italian or German poet. This taste grew by degrees, to be a rare
and subtle pleasure to me. My rhymes became my companions, and when the
interval of stagnation came, I was restless and lonely till it
passed away.

At length there came an hour (I was lying, I remember, on a ledge of
turf on a mountain-side, overlooking one of the Italian valleys of the
Alps), when I asked myself for the first time--

"Am I also a poet?"

I had never dreamed of it, never thought of it, never even hoped it,
till that moment. I had scribbled on, idly, carelessly, out of what
seemed a mere facile impulse, correcting nothing; seldom even reading
what I had written, aft