himself, but for the young man his father had befriended, alone in
London. With his help he found an humble lodging not far from the
British Museum, to the neighborhood of which his love of books led him;
and for a time, feeling no necessity for immediate effort, he gave
himself to the study of certain departments of our literature not
hitherto within his easy reach. In the evening he would write, or
accompany his new friend to some lecture or amusement; and so the weeks
passed. To earn something seemed but a slowly approaching necessity, and
the weeks grew to months. He was never idle, for his tastes were strong,
and he had delight in his pen; but so sensitive was his social skin,
partly from the licking of his aunt's dry, feline tongue, that he shrunk
from submitting anything he wrote to Harold Sullivan, who, a man of
firmer and more world-capable stuff than he, would at least have shown
him how things which the author saw and judged from the inner side of
the web, must appear on the other side. There are few weavers of thought
capable of turning round the web and contemplating with unprejudiced
regard the side of it about to be offered to the world, so as to
perceive how it will look to eyes alien to its genesis.

It would be to repeat a story often told, to relate how he sent poem
after poem, now to this now to that periodical, with the same
result--that he never heard of them again. The verses over which he had
labored with delight, in the crimson glory they reflected on the heart
whence they issued, were nothing in any eyes to which he submitted them.
In truth, except for a good line here and there, they were by no means
on the outer side what they looked to him on the inner. He read them in
the light of the feeling in which he had written them; whoever else read
them had not this light to interpret them by, had no correspondent mood
ready to receive them. It was the business of the verse itself, by
witchery of sound and magic of phrase, to rouse receptive mood: of this