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to freedom, we are not surprised to hear him say to Merck in the early Weimar days: "We are somewhat mad here, and play the devil's own game."

While I had been letting my thoughts run in this riotous fashion Rosalind had been intently reading. Maurice de Guérin. Suddenly she looked up from the book and read aloud some striking sentences from that exquisite piece of poetic interpretation, the "Centaur." The old Centaur is telling the story of his wonderful early life, with its seclusion, its unfettered freedom, its kinship with nature, its nearness to the gods. There is in the story a deep sincerity, a simplicity, a strange familiarity with the secrets and mysteries of nature, which never cease to touch me as a kind of new power in literature. The Centaur describes his wild, far wanderings through the deep valleys and along the mountain summits until the evening shadows began to fill the recesses of the remoter hills. "But when Night, filled with the charm of the gods, overtook me on the slopes of the mountain, she guided me to the mouth of the caverns, and there tranquilized me as she tranquilizes the billows of the sea. Stretched across the threshold of my retreat, my flanks hidden within the cave, and my head under the open sky, I watched the spectacle of the dark. it is said, quit during the hours of darkness their places under the deep; they seat themselves on the promontories, and their eyes wander over the expanse of the waves. Even so I kept watch, hav

The sea gods,

sea.

ing at my feet an expanse of life like the hushed My regards had free range, and traveled to the most distant points. Like sea beaches which never lose their wetness, the line of mountains to the west retained the imprint of gleams not perfectly wiped out by the shadows. In that quarter still survived, in pale clearness, mountain summits naked and pure. There I beheld at one time the god Pan descend ever solitary; at another, the choir of the mystic divinities; or I saw some mountain nymph charmstruck by the night. Sometimes the eagles of Mount Olympus traversed the upper sky, and were lost to view among the far-off constellations, or in the shade of the dreaming forests."

I cannot describe the eloquence of these words as Rosalind read them, with rising color and deepening tone; the eloquence of the imagination narrating the past, and making its most wondrous forms live again. The secret of the Centaur perished with him, but not the charm of his life. The wild, free range of being, with vision of descending deities and spell-bound nymphs; the fellowship with mighty forces that science has never tamed; the sway of impulses that rise out of the vast unconscious life of nature-these still penetrate at times our habits and occupations, and find our hearts fresh and responsive. It is then that we draw away from men for a season, and become one of those of whom the same wise Centaur said that they had "picked up on the waters or in the woods, and car

ried to their lips, some pieces of the reed pipe thrown away by the god Pan. From that hour these mortals, having caught from their relics of the god a passion for wild life, or perhaps smitten with some secret madness, enter into the wilderness, plunge among the forests, follow the course of the streams, bury themselves in the heart of the mountains, restless, and haunted by an unknown purpose."

CHAPTER XXIII.

THE METHOD OF GENIUS.

ROSALIND had been so absorbed in reading Mr. Lowell's essay on Gray that she had not noted the slow sinking of the fire; it was only when she had finished that noble piece of criticism and laid aside the volume that she became suddenly conscious of her lapse of duty, and began to make vigorous reparation for her oversight. For a moment the flame crept cautiously along the edges of the wood; and then, taking heart from glowing fellowship, suddenly burst into full blaze and answered the roaring wind without with its own note of defiance. I sat quietly behind my desk, enjoying the various charming pictures, framed in mingled light and shadow, which Rosalind's struggle with the fire seemed to project into the room. I am sure that the charm is in her, and that the illusive play of imagination, the soft and wandering glow touching now a book and now a picture, the genial warmth which pervades the place, are really a subtle materialization of her qualities. For me at least, the fire loses its gentle monotone of consolation when her face is not transfigured by it, and I enjoy it most when I feel most deeply that it is but a symbol of that which she has added to my life.

I was saying that Rosalind had been reading Mr. Lowell's essay on Gray. When she had stirred the smoldering flame into a blaze, she opened the book again and read aloud here and there a luminous criticism, or one of those perfect felicities of style which thrill one as with a sudden music. When she had finished she said, with a half-sigh: "I am sure there can be but one pleasure greater than the reading of such a piece of work, and that is the writing of it. Why does it kindle my imagination so powerfully? why does it make everything I have read lately seem thin and cold?"

There is a soft glow on her face as she asks this question, which I cannot help thinking is the most charming tribute ever paid even to Mr. Lowell, a writer fortunate beyond most men of genius in the recognition of his contemporaries. The question and the face tempt me away from desk and my task, and invite me to the easy-chair from whence I have so often studied the vagaries of the restless fire. Rosalind's question goes to the very heart of the greatest of the arts, and has a personal interest because she takes as her text one of the best known and best loved of the friends whose silent speech makes this room eloquent. The second series of "Among My Books" lies on the desk at my hand, and as I open it at random the eye falls on these words from the essay on Dante: "The man behind the verse is far greater than the verse itself, and the impulse he gives to what is deepest and most sacred

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