himself.'

'I understand thee not, cousin.'

'And I understand not thy not understanding. Therefore can there be
no communion between us.'

So saying Dorothy left him to what consolation he could find in such
china-pastoral abuse as the gallants of the day would, with the aid
of poetic penny-trumpet, cast upon offending damsels--Daphnes and
Chloes, and, in the mood, heathen shepherdesses in general. But,
fortunately for himself, how great soever had been the freedom with
which he had lost and changed many a foolish liking, he found, let
his hopelessness or his offence be what it might, he had not the
power to shake himself free from the first worthy passion ever
roused in him. It had struck root below the sandy upper stratum of
his mind into a clay soil beneath, where at least it was able to
hold, and whence it could draw a little slow reluctant nourishment.

During his poetic anger, he wrote no small amount of fair verse,
tried by the standard of Cowley, Carew, and Suckling, so like theirs
indeed that the best of it might have passed for some of their
worst, although there was not in it all a single phrase to remind
one of their best. But when the poetic spring began to run dry, he
fell once more into a sort of wilful despair, and disrelished
everything, except indeed his food and drink, so much so that his
master perceiving his altered cheer, one day addressed him to know
the cause.

'What aileth thee, Rowland?' he said kindly. 'For this se'ennight