Of course, some find that love early--the baby-love, whom one never
marries, and then the faithful service. Probably it happens so with the
majority of men; for it is, I think, especially to the artist nature
that it comes thus late. Living so vividly within the circle of its own
experience, by its very constitution so necessarily egoistic, the
latter, more particularly in its early years, is always a Narcissus,
caring for nought or none except in so much as they reflect back its own
beauty or its own dreams. The face such a youth looks for, as he turns
the coy captured head to meet his glance, is, quite unconsciously, his
own, and the 'ideal' he seeks is but the perfect mirror. Yet it is not
that mirror he marries after all: for when at last he has come to know
what that word--one so distasteful, so 'soiled' to his ear 'with all
ignoble' domesticity--what that word 'wife' really expresses, he has
learnt, too, to discredit those cynical guides of his youth who love so
well to write Ego as the last word of human nature.

But the particular Narcissus of whom I write was a long way off that
thirteenth maid in the days of his antiquarian rambles and his
Pagan-Catholic ardours, and the above digression is at least out of
date.

A copy of Keats which I have by me as I write is a memorial of one of
the pretty loves typical of that period. It is marked all through in
black lead--not so gracefully as one would have expected from the 'taper
fingers' which held the pencil, but rather, it would appear, more with
regard to emphasis than grace. Narcissus had lent it to the queen of the
hour with special instructions to that end, so that when it came to him
again he might ravish his soul with the hugging assurance given by the
thick lead to certain ecstatic lines of _Endymion,_ such as--