Austen, though a bright and true little world, is but an asteroid."
He was therefore pleased to find apple-blossoms co-existing with ripe
strawberries on June 28, as Miss Austen has been blamed, by minute
philosophers, for introducing this combination in the garden party in
Emma. The poet, like most of the good and great, read novels
eagerly, and excited himself over the confirmation of an adult male
in a story by Miss Yonge. Of Scott, "the most chivalrous literary
figure of the century, and the author with the widest range since
Shakespeare," he preferred Old Mortality, and it is a good choice.
He hated "morbid and introspective tales, with their oceans of sham
philosophy." At this time, with catholic taste, he read Mr Stevenson
and Mr Meredith, Miss Braddon and Mr Henry James, Ouida and Mr Thomas
Hardy; Mr Hall Caine and Mr Anstey; Mrs Oliphant and Miss Edna Lyall.
Not everybody can peruse all of these very diverse authors with
pleasure. He began his poem on the Roman gladiatorial combats;
indeed his years, fourscore and one, left his intellectual eagerness
as unimpaired as that of Goethe. "A crooked share," he said to the
Princess Louise, "may make a straight furrow." "One afternoon he had
a long waltz with M- in the ballroom." Speaking of


"All the charm of all the Muses
Often flowering in a lonely word"


in Virgil, he adduced, rather strangely, the cunctantem ramum, said
of the Golden Bough, in the Sixth AEneid. The choice is odd, because
the Sibyl has just told AEneas that, if he be destined to pluck the
branch of gold, ipse volens facilisque sequetur, "it will come off of
its own accord," like the sacred ti branches of the Fijians, which