added that nothing can exceed the delicacy of behavior on the part of the victor on such occasions. It is only by a little increase of color, an irrepressible light in the eye, that the consciousness of success is betrayed. Friendly relations are immediately resumed, and one is even deluded into the conviction that his defeat was more apparent than real, and that in disaster his own greatness has become more evident, and been instantly recognized. This is a delightful feeling, and it survives as long as it remains unexpressed. This is a long digression, but an open fire sings as many tunes as one has moods, and I make no apology for rambling from my subject. At that very moment Goethe's "Autobiography" lay open in Rosalind's lap; I gently disentangled it from some of that ornamental work which fringes all a woman's occupations, and read the legend of the poet's youth which he calls "The New Paris." Goethe learned very early to tell stories acceptably; he came naturally by an art in which his mother excelled, of whom he says "Von Mütterchen die Frohnatur His playfellows were constantly entertained by the recitals of his marvelous adventures, and they were delighted especially with his report of a certain garden into which he found his way through a gate in the city walls, and within whose magical boun daries all manner of strange things were seen by the adventurous boy. This was told so often and with such circumstantiality that it was accepted as fact not only by the listeners, but by the narrator himself. Each boy privately visited the part of the wall where the gate was supposed to be, and each found confirmation of the story. There were even warm discussions as to the exact position of certain wholly imaginary things which each one had seen. Every one who has the privilege of being intrusted with the confidences of children knows that the imagination has an equal power with reality over them. They make imaginary or dream worlds, and sustain them by an unbroken faith until the light of knowledge slowly and sadly disintegrates them. The mind dreams, and creates worlds out of its dreams, as naturally and as inevitably as it observes and learns real things. It is not surprising that a kinsman of one of the greatest dreamers of modern times should have been the architect of one of these ideal worlds. Hartley Coleridge believed fully that some day a stream would break out of the soil of a neighboring meadow, and that along its swiftly created banks a new race would find its home and a new life organize itself. This was no vague dream; it was so real, so definite, and so continuous that the boy knew its geography as well as that of the country about it, and even made an accurate map of it. This secret possession of Hartley's imagination was shared by his brother Derwent, and for years the two boys watched the growth of nations in this invisible continent, the evolution of national institutions, religions, and laws; they were spectators of battles and civic conflicts; they knew the private histories of the great generals and statesmen who arose from time to time; and in the long course of years they saw radical and far-reaching changes of government and society. Everybody remembers the ideal empire of Gombroon which De Quincey ruled in his youth, and the government of which, in an evil hour, he divided with his elder brother. The latter took such an aggressive attitude toward the people of Gombroon that the younger ruler was obliged to make a long and desperate struggle to preserve their independence. Things at length came to such a pass that, in order to defeat the machinations of an unscrupulous enemy, the creator of the invisible empire had to face the question of destroying it. "Ah, but no! I had contracted obligations to Gombroon; I had submitted my conscience to a yoke, and in secret truth my will had no such autocratic power. Long contemplation of a shadow, earnest study for the welfare of that shadow, sympathy with the wounded sensibilities of that shadow under accumulated wrongs-these bitter experiences, nursed by brooding thought, had gradually frozen that shadow into a rigor of reality far denser than the material realities of brass or granite." Such records of imaginative childhood as these might be multiplied indefinitely; they register not so much isolated activities as an inevitable and normal stage of development. It is a theory of mine that childhood contains in the germ all that maturity ever develops or displays, and I find particular illustration of this in the persistence and splendor with which this faculty of ideal creation has worked in the literature of the world. For instance-it occurs to me just here that I have wholly failed to report the discussion between Rosalind and myself which arose when I laid down the poker and settled back in the easy-chair. I think it wisest, upon the whole, to leave that conversation unrecorded, but I hope no one will connect this decision on my part with what I have written in a strictly general way about such discussions. CHAPTER XI. A TEXT FROM SIDNEY. ROSALIND has given me a text this evening. She was reading Sidney's "Defense of Poesy," and, as a contribution to a talk we had been having on poetry, she read these words aloud: "Since, then, poetry is of all human learnings the most ancient and of most fatherly antiquity, as from whence other learnings have taken their beginnings; since it is so universal that no learned nation doth despise it, nor barbarous nation is without it; since both Roman and Greek gave such divine names unto it, the one of prophesying, the other of making, and that indeed that name of making is fit for it, considering, that where all other arts retain themselves within their subject, and receive, as it were, their being from it, the poet only, only bringeth his own stuff, and doth not learn a conceit out of a matter, but maketh matter for a conceit . . . I think, and think I think rightly, the laurel crown appointed for triumphant captains doth worthily, of all other learnings, honor the poet's triumph." These were familiar words, but they fitted my mood so perfectly that I seemed to be hearing them for the first time. I had spent the whole day in a world which a great poet had formed |