the fine should, to the sacrifice of the faculty we most know them by,
have to become mere morsels in the huge promiscuity, and of the thrill
of seeing that they add more than ever to our knowledge and our passion,
which somehow thus becomes at the same time an unfathomable abyss.

Rupert, who had joined the Naval Brigade, took part in the rather
distractedly improvised--as it at least at the moment appeared--movement
for the relief of the doomed Antwerp, but was, later on, after the
return of the force so engaged, for a few days in London, whither he had
come up from camp in Dorsetshire, briefly invalided; thanks to which
accident I had on a couple of occasions my last sight of him. It was all
auspiciously, well-nigh extravagantly, congruous; nothing certainly
could have been called more modern than all the elements and suggestions
of his situation for the hour, the very spot in London that could best
serve as a centre for vibrations the keenest and most various; a
challenge to the appreciation of life, to that of the whole range of the
possible English future, at its most uplifting. He had not yet so much
struck me as an admirable nature _en disponibilite_ and such as any
cause, however high, might swallow up with a sense of being the sounder
and sweeter for. More definitely perhaps the young poet, with all the
wind alive in his sails, was as evident there in the guise of the young
soldier and the thrice welcome young friend, who yet, I all recognisably
remember, insisted on himself as little as ever in either character, and
seemed even more disposed than usual not to let his intelligibility
interfere with his modesty. He promptly recovered and returned to camp,
whence it was testified that his specific practical aptitude, under the
lively call, left nothing to be desired--a fact that expressed again, to
the perception of his circle, with what truth the spring of inspiration
worked in him, in the sense, I mean, that his imagination itself
shouldered and made light of the material load. It had not yet, at the