never will be. It has, so far as I know, no title, this unpublished book
of mine. For it would need the blood of rubies and the life of diamonds
crusted on ivory to set the title of this book_.

_Mostly I see it in the late night watches, when the twilight verges to
the cock-crowing and the universe is silent, stirless, windless, for
about the space of one hour. Then the pages of the book are opened a
little; and, as one that reads hungrily, hastily, at the bookstall of an
impatient vendor a book he cannot buy, so I scan the idylls, the epics,
the dramas of the life of man written in words which thrill me as I
read. Some are fiercely tender, some yearning and unsatisfying, some
bitter in the mouth but afterward sweet in the belly. All are expressed
in words so fit and chaste and noble, that each is an immortal poem
which would give me deathless fame--could I, alas! but remember_.

_Then the morning comes, and with the first red I awake to a sense of
utter loss and bottomless despair. Once more I have clutched and missed
and forgotten. It is gone from me. The imagination of my heart is left
unto me desolate. Sometimes indeed when a waking bird--by preference a
mavis--sings outside my window, for a little while after I swim upward
out of the ocean of sleep, it seems that I might possibly remember one
stanza of the deathless words; or even by chance recapture, like the
brown speckled thrush, that "first fine careless rapture" of the
adorable refrain_.

_Even when I arise and walk out in the dawn, as is my custom winter and
summer, still I have visions of this book of mine, of which I now
remember that the mystic name is "The Book Sealed." Sometimes in these
dreams of the morning, as I walk abroad, I find my hands upon the
clasps. I touch the binding wax of the seals. When the first rosy