ple as New York people who go to dances usually know at the dances they usually go to. Along about the eighth morning, my Celtic fraction roused me at dawn, and had me up on deck a long time to look at Fastnet light and the coast of Ireland, so that my English majority was sore all day for loss of sleep. Our good friend the judge of Queens and his wife

got off at Queenstown, with a score of other passengers. Some newspapers came aboard, which were no substitute for the judge, and some fresh food, and having rested ship for four or five hours we sped on for the rest of a restless day, packed up our belongings before we went to bed, and woke up next morning at the wharf in Liverpool.

T

one who, since boyhood and scarlet fever, had never known what it was to be kept for a day in bed by illness, the swift change from health and activity to the condition of a surgical case, helpless, inert, imprisoned, was startling in the ex-. treme. A wild dream it seemed to be at the first return to consciousness. The reawakening came as if it were a rebirth which, like its original, was only "a sleep and a forgetting." Then one became suddenly aware that the world had shrunk into a small room and that this new little world was filled with one's own petty personality and with naught else. All the interests of yesterday, all the thoughts of the waking hours, of public affairs, of private joys and personal cares-all alike seemed to have vanished. But their departure brought no sorrow. The vacant spaces, the empty air which they left behind, brought only a drowsy sense of rest and quiet. There was no longing to fill the void so suddenly created. Even the mere thought of attempting it was so wearying, so painful indeed, that it faded away with the visions of what once had been, leaving nothing but a sensation of peace and soft content.

For the first days, lying chained to one position, it was enough to gaze through the window: to see the grassy slope climbing slowly among the gray ledges to the crest of the cliffs and then beyond that crest to behold the ocean floor and the far horizon-line. There was a pe

culiar joy in watching the darkness fade as the vault of heaven filled with gradual light while over all stole quietly the flush of dawn. Then the shadows appeared and shortened and disappeared; came again as the sun passed the zenith, and slowly lengthened until swallowed up in the gathering night. And against the darkening sky, where the gazer all motionless had seen the dawn, there now sprang out the flashing light from the high tower on the low ledge hard by which marked the entrance to the city's harbor; while still beyond, far down on the horizon's edge, glittered another great light which from its sunken reef pointed out for those who had gone down to the sea in ships the way to safety and repose.

A few days passed and then came another room, another window, and another view. Here the ocean seemed to lie at one's feet; no distant horizon-line but the coast on the other side of the broad bay curving away in a line as beautiful as the Apulian shore when we look at it from Taormina. The infinite aspect of the sea which, seen from the first window, knew no barriers until it washed the shores of Portugal, was gone. In its stead, in the place of the brooding peace of the unbounded ocean came the life and motion of the waters chafing against the land. The great torches which beckon to the huge ships suddenly coming up out of the ocean wastes no longer shot sharply through the darkness and their place was taken by a quiet little light, burning with red steadfastness only to guide a few

stray fishermen or small trading schooners as they made their way north and south, clinging to the coast, which is normally their safety and at times, alas, their grave! The quiet red light had a calm, domestic air which seemed very soothing and comforting after the piercing flashes of the stern towers rising in lonely abruptness from the sea.

October of last year, if not a "close bosom friend of the maturing sun," so far as any one could see, was certainly a season of mists." For five days the New England coast was wrapped in a fog of unequalled duration and density. Yet to one with naught to do but watch it was soon made manifest that these sea mists were not guilty of the blank absence of change so dreary to the impatient passengers on fog-bound ships. Without apparent reason the mists would retreat and the rocky coast would emerge as if suddenly reborn into the world. Then the mist columns would come marching back with gathered reinforcements from the ocean, and all things on land and sea would vanish behind the soft gray veil. Sometimes they would creep in over the surface of the water and all on the sealevel would disappear, leaving the lighthouse on high, vivid and distinct, looking down upon the eddying wreaths below; and then again they would drift back high up and the light aloft would be lost while all the edges of the rocks would be clear upon the water-line. All these movements, sudden, surprisingly destitute of reason or apparent cause, were graceful and beautiful, concealing an invisible force which is so impressive to the finite sense, and all the more so here from the extreme gentleness with which it moved.

To fogs succeeded storms and with the storms came a heavy surf. The slow, gliding movements of the mist were gone and the whole scene was pervaded with a restless violence. By the hour together the onlooker could watch the waves climbing the reefs and cliffs along the outstretched line of rock-bound coast, only to fall back and come roaring in again, masses of white and angry foam, impelled by hidden forces, exuberant in all the infinite variety which can never grow stale to those who gaze with wonder. Across the clouds and rain swept the great gulls who

come from Labrador to pass the winter in the milder climate of Massachusetts. To see them soaring up and down, floating easily upon the gale, careless of rain and wind alike, is a beautiful sight, a spectacle of grace and power which never wearies. As one watches the wonder grows, and ever more insistently the watcher asks how many eons of time nature consumed in the evolution of such perfect flying-machines. Nearer home were six crows who had been living on the point for some weeks. They moved about, consulted together, went from tree to ground and back again, and presented always that exhibition of busy idleness which has such an enduring charm to those whose lot it is to labor in this workaday world.

But it was at night that the second window had its most enthralling charm. In the darkness the broad waters of the bay stood out with a still deeper blackness, cold, unrelenting, unwavering. It seemed so unfeeling, so final, that one shrank from it as if it symbolized the last great blank when all material things have perished. Then one raised his eyes and far across the bay, white and luminous above the blackness of the sea, shone out the electric lights along the shore. They seemed very human, very kind and friendly, those lights across the bay, and on the rare nights when the sky was clear it needed but another lift of the eyes and one saw the stars in all their steady splendor, while toward morning the waning moon would cast its pale light through the air and the darkness of the waters would soften and take on the purple tone of Homer's wine-dark sea. Yet the pleasantest memory of that scene of night is, after all, those lights across the bay, which seemed to bring hope and rest and peace when the dark water had been passed and the tired sight lost all weariness as it met the glow of the human lamps and, far above, the unchanging glitter of the stars.

All these sights thus seen from two windows had been part of his existence from the day when the convalescent first opened his eyes upon the world about him. The sky and sea in all their moods had been the friends of a lifetime. Every ledge, every reef, every pool teeming with life, every bend and curve in the coast-line were known to him with a more minute

knowledge than anything else on earth. Yet now, as the mind began at intervals to pass outside the mere physical conditions of the body, it would rest with a sensation of deep repose upon these familiar sights and find in them beauties and reflections, not without depth of meaning, never noted in all the years which had gone before. They all seemed full of voices and the voices were saying: "Look at us; you thought you knew us well, but we are filled with undiscovered beauties and we have many secrets yet untold." At the same time the mind, as it reawakened, recoiled as at the outset from all which had occupied it in the daily round of life now so remote. The thoughts would not take their wonted course. The effort to make them do so was not only forbidden but was too laborious to be attempted. So the thoughts thus set free turned first without strain, entirely of themselves, quite restfully to the familiar sights of ocean and land and sky which came unaided to the field of vision. It seemed like a voyage of discovery with ever new delights, as the eye unmoving read the twice-told tale. It was beyond measure interesting to cease from all effort to apply one's mind and to allow the vagrant thoughts to stray whithersoever they would in glorious irresponsibility.

Very soon indeed they began to extend their journeys and to travel from the visible world into the world of books, not that book world which is filled with "unconcerning facts" and crowded with the gathered knowledge of the centuries, but that far fairer world which is the creation of imagination. The convalescent restored to health and strength remembers well the first thought, which was not a part of what he saw, and which floated into his head on one of the first mornings as he watched the dawn. It brought with it the memory of certain lines in Matthew Arnold's well-known poem "The Wish":

"Bathed in the sacred dews of morn
The wide aërial landscape spread-
The world which was ere I was born,
The world which lasts when I am dead;

"Which never was the friend of one,
Nor promised love it could not give,
But lit for all its generous sun,
And lived itself, and made us live."

The lines are as familiar as they are beautiful. They come from a melancholy poem, but at that moment there seemed in them no shade of sadness, only sympathetic feeling, a consoling and tender loveliness.

It so happened that during the summer the convalescent had read the Odyssey. Now his mind went back to it and all the stories came drifting by, each one bringing a picture which seemed to frame itself in the window and find its scene upon the cliffs with their ocean background. Chief among them, most constantly visitant, was the return of Odysseus in disguise and the slaying of the suitors in the hall, perhaps the greatest story, merely as a story, ever written. In some unexplained way the incident of "Argos" seemed to stand out especially among all the others and the convalescent found himself with his wellnigh all-forgotten Greek trying feebly and yet without a sense of effort to put the lines together. They are few indeed: no great feat to say them over if one can but recall them, which the searcher could not do except in fragments.

**Ενθα κύων κεῖτο "Αργος ἐνίπλειος κυνοραϊστέων. Δὴ τότε γ ̓, ὡς ἐνόησεν Οδυσσέα ἐγγὺς ἐόντα, Οὐρῇ μέν ῥ ̓ ὅ γ ̓ ἔσηνε καὶ οὔατα κάββαλεν ἄμφω, *Ασσον δ' ουκέτ' ἔπειτα δυνήσατο οἷο ἄνακτος Ἐλθέμεν.

and then:

+ Αργον δ ̓ αὖ κατὰ μοιρ ̓ ἔλαβεν μέλανος θανάτοιο. That is all. The recognition of the master when all others fail and then the death of the old dog. There is deep pathos in it, in the contrast between the loving instinct of the animal and the human forgetfulness of the absent. "I am as true as truth's simplicity and simpler than the infancy of truth." We must turn to another great genius to find the phrase which exactly describes the imagination from which came forth the tales of_the Odyssey.

It so happened that a few weeks later the reviving convalescent read a book which contained a burlesque of Homer. The last sentence of this bit of humor

There lay the Dog Argos, full of vermin. Yet even now when he was aware of Ulysses standing by, he wagged his tail and dropped both his ears, but nearer to his master he had not now strength to draw.

† But upon Argos came the fate of black death.

may also have been intended to be comic or perhaps was written in the profoundest irony, but it seemed as if it was seriously meant. The author wished universities to understand what the classics really were: "only primitive literature; in the same class as primitive machinery and primitive music and primitive medicine." The convalescent wondered as he read this observation what the author meant by "primitive," for Homer's men were much farther removed from primitive man in the scientific sense than we are from the men of the Iliad. The statement, however, although occurring at the end of a burlesque of Homer, referred to the classics generally. So the convalescent diverted himself by wondering whether the writer regarded the authors of "The Republic," "The Politics," and the "De Natura Rerum" as "primitive men." The distinction between intellectual power and mere knowledge of accumulated facts seemed in some way to have been lost sight of and the convalescent tried to think of the men of our own radiant civilization who in mere naked power of thought and intellect surpassed Plato and Aristotle and Lucretius. Their names did not at the moment occur to him, probably on account of his weakened condition. Most of all, the convalescent marvelled at the queer theory that "primitive" men should not be able to produce works of the imagination because they were destitute of modern machinery. He had always thought that among socalled primitive people, in the dawn of civilization, the imagination was unusually strong, just as it is in a child compared with the grown man. This he had believed to be a truism and indeed he well knew that it was one of the "commonplaces, glorified" by Macaulay, to borrow Carlyle's phrase. Did not a genius greater even than Homer, he said to himself, touch the last scene of a royal tragedy with the bitter memory of a loved and faithless horse? Who can forget the effect produced by the thought of "Roan Barbary" upon the fallen and imprisoned king with sudden death lurking behind the arras? The conversation with the groom is simple, commonplace almost, in expression, and yet it conveys a sense of pathos and misery so poignant that it

pierces the heart. Then as the convalescent reflected still further upon the dog Argos there came to him the memory of a great actor moving crowded audiences to smiles and tears by saying in a quiet voice: "If my dog Schneider were here he would know me," just as the rhapsodists moved the Greeks by repeating in noble verse the twice-told tale of Odysseus and his old hound. It seemed as if we too must be "primitive" or else that the poet who sang of Achilles' wrath touched a chord which always vibrates and had in all he wrote the quality of the eternal so long as human nature exists. Perhaps, after all, he was neither "primitive" nor modern, but simply a great genius.

From Homer the convalescent's mind wandered happily and of its own accord to the poetry of his own language. He found himself trying to repeat verses which without any will of his own came fluttering into his mind. He was struck by the fact that those which came first were not from the poets of the nineteenth century, among whom are numbered some of the best-loved and most familiar, but were from the Elizabethans, from the seventeenth-century poets, from the songwriters of the great period of English song, from the

as he thought, a brief epitome of the Elizabethan genius. In the first and last verses were the aphorisms full of wisdom and reflection, condensed, concise, in which the Elizabethans so delighted, and then in the middle flashed out the tender and exquisite image of the lily, all compact of imaginative beauty. With unerring voice the poet touches that high note which they all in that day seemed able to do whenever they tried, even in the midst of their extravagances and conceits and all the other faults and failings which were the ephemeral children of the fashion of the day. Scores of critics and lovers of poetry probably had observed all this before in these same verses, but it came to the convalescent as a discovery and he felt as much happiness as the "watcher of the skies"

"When a new planet swims into his ken."

This stanza of Ben Jonson happened to stray into his mind first, why he could not guess, but his thoughts ranging at will through the wide spaces of memory turned naturally and chiefly to Milton and Shakespeare, above all to the latter. Passages from "Paradise Lost," from "Lycidas," "L'Allegro," "Il Penseroso," the "Samson Agonistes," and the "Comus," and lines from the sonnets, came unbidden in the silences of such a time. They were only fragments, but there was an endless pleasure in trying to recite them, to see how far the convalescent could go, and there was something infinitely soothing and satisfying in their noble beauty and in the mere perfection of the words and rhythm, for Milton is the greatest master of metrics in English and makes an appeal possible only to the

"Chief of organic numbers! Old scholar of the spheres! Thy music never slumbers, But rolls about our ears Forever and forever!"

Yet it was to Shakespeare, best known and best beloved, that the convalescent's mind turned most constantly. His words recurred unceasingly as the thoughts, effortless and unfettered, flitted here and there. Passages from the plays, entire sonnets, repeated themselves to the con

tent.

valescent, some over and over again, always with a sense of peace and deep conFamiliar again as the sight of sea and rock and sky outside the window, they seemed now to be filled with beauties never seen and a music never heard before. Kind hands had placed beside the bed the "Golden Treasury" and the "Oxford Book of English Verse," and one day not long after the swift reduction to immobility had befallen the convalescent he stretched out his hand, took up the "Golden Treasury," opened it at random, and read one Shakespeare sonnet. The physical act of reading those fourteen lines seemed a most remarkable and fatiguing feat at the moment, but once accomplished it filled some hours with pleasure as the convalescent gazed through yet another window at a sunset fire kindling the clouds, and quietly reflected on what he had just read. The ability to read, after this first memorable experiment, came back more rapidly than any other, and in a little while it was possible to read many lines instead of only fourteen.

In the "Oxford Book of Verse" Shakespeare's songs are printed together. The convalescent knew them all very intimately, but it so happened that he had never read them one after another in unbroken succession, and the effect of doing so was a fresh impression of the limitless quality of Shakespeare's genius. To write a song of the most perfect beauty when he happened to think that it would be well at that point to give "Jack" Wilson a chance to sing something seems to have been as easy to him as it is to the "lark to trill all day." So easy to him and yet how rare and marvellous the art! Swinburne says in his drastic way that English song-writing in the fine and true sense ended with Herrick. It sounds like an extreme statement and yet it is difficult to controvert it. Poems, lyrics of highest beauty and splendor, touching every note in the gamut of emotions, we have had since then and in a rich abundance. But the lyrics or the poems of the first rank, which are also songs which sing themselves and lose no jot of their perfection, are sufficiently uncommon since the early seventeenth century, when it seemed as if every poet and dramatist had the power, either at some great moment, or