A. Yes, to await a new spring! But this conversation is profitless. Words can neither conceal nor make up for the want of flowing love. I do not blame you, Laurie, but I cannot afford to love you as I have done any more, nor would it avail either of us, if I could. Seek elsewhere what you can no longer duly prize from me. Let us not seek to raise the dead from their tombs, but cherish rather the innocent children of to-day. L. But I cannot be happy unless there is a perfectly good understanding between us.

A. That, indeed, we ought to have. I feel the power of understanding your course, whether it bend my way or not. I need not communication from you, or personal relation to do that,

I have known you too deeply to misjudge you, in the long run. L. Yet you have been tempted to think me heartless.

A. For the moment only; have I not said it? Thought always convinced me that I could not have been so shallow as to barter heart for anything but heart. I only, by the bold play natural to me, led you to stake too high for your present income. I do not demand the forfeit on the friendly game. Do you understand me?

L. No, I do not understand being both friendly and cold. A. Thou wilt, when thou shalt have lent as well as borrowed.

I can bring forward on this subject gospel independent of our own experience. The poets, as usual, have thought out the subject for their age. And it is an age where the complex and subtle workings of its spirit make it not easy for the immortal band, the sacred band of equal friends, to be formed into phalanx, or march with equal step in any form.

Soon after I had begun to read some lines of our horoscope, I found this poem in Wordsworth, which seemed to link into meaning many sounds that were vibrating round me.

A COMPLAINT.

There is a change, and I am poor;
Your Love hath been, nor long ago,
A Fountain at my fond Heart's door,
Whose only business was to flow;

And flow it did; not taking heed
Of its own bounty, or my need.

What happy moments did I count,
Blest was I then all bliss above;

Now, for this consecrated Fount
Of murmuring, sparkling, living love,
What have I? shall I dare to tell?

A comfortless and hidden WELL.

A Well of love, it may be deep,

I trust it is, and never dry;

What matter? if the Waters sleep

In silence and obscurity,

Such change, and at the very door

Of my fond heart, hath made me poor.

This, at the time, seemed unanswerable; yet, afterwards I found among the writings of Coleridge what may serve as a sufficient answer.

A SOLILOQUY.

Unchanged within to see all changed without
Is a blank lot and hard to bear, no doubt.
Yet why at other's wanings shouldst thou fret ?
Then only might'st thou feel a just regret,
Hadst thou withheld thy love, or hid thy light
In selfish forethought of neglect and slight,

O wiselier, then, from feeble yearnings freed,
While, and on whom, thou mayst, shine on! nor heed
Whether the object by reflected light

Return thy radiance or absorb it quite;

And though thou notest from thy safe recess
Old Friends burn dim, like lamps in noisome air,

Love them for what they are; nor love them less,
Because to thee they are not what they were.

L. Do you expect to be able permanently to abide by such solace ?

A. I do not expect so Olympian a calmness, that at first, when the chain of intercourse is broken, when confidence is dismayed, and thought driven back upon its source, I shall not feel a transient pang, even a shame, as when

"The sacred secret hath flown out of us,

And the heart been broken open by deep care.

The wave receding, leaves the strand for the moment forlorn, and weed-bestrown.

L. And is there no help for this? Is there not a pride, a prudence, identical with self-respect, that could preserve us from such mistakes?

A. If you can show me one that is not selfish forethought of neglect or slight, I would wear it and recommend it as the desired amulet. As yet, I know no pride, no prudence except love of truth.

Would a prudence be desirable that should have hindered our intimacy?

L. Ah, no! it was happy, it was rich.

A. Very well then, let us drink the bitter with as good a grace as the sweet, and for to-night talk no more of ourselves.

L. To talk then of those other, better selves, the poets. I can well understand that Coleridge should have drunk so deeply as he did of this bitter-sweet. His nature was ardent, intense, variable in its workings, one of tides, crises, fermentations. He was the flint from which the spark must be struck by violent collision. His life was a mass in the midst of which fire glowed, but needed time to transfuse it, as his heavenly eyes glowed

amid such heavy features. The habit of taking opium was but an outward expression of the transports and depressions to which he was inly prone. In him glided up in the silence, equally vivid, the Christabel, the Geraldine. Through his various mind

'Alph, the sacred river, ran

Through caverns measureless to man,
Down to a sunless sea."

He was one of those with whom

"The meteor offspring of the brain

Unnourished wane,

Faith asks her daily bread,

And fancy must be fed."

And when this was denied,

“Came a restless state, 'twixt yea and nay,

His faith was fixed, his heart all ebb and flow;

Or like a bark, in some half-sheltered bay,

Above its anchor driving to and fro."

Thus we cannot wonder that he, with all his vast mental resources and noble aims, should have been the bard elect to sing of Dejection, and that the pages of his prose works should be blistered by more painful records of personal and social experiences, than we find in almost any from a mind able to invoke the aid of divine philosophy, a mind touched by humble piety. But Wordsworth, who so early knew, and sought, and found the life and the work he wanted, whose wide and equable thought flows on like a river through the plain, whose verse seemed to come daily like the dew to rest upon the flowers of home affections, we should think he might always have been with his friend, as he describes two who had grown up together,

"Each other's advocate, each other's stay,

And strangers to content, if long apart,

Or more divided than a sportive pair

Of sea-fowl, conscious both that they are hovering
Within the eddy of a common blast,

Or hidden only by the concave depth

Of neighbouring billows from each other's sight.”

And that we should not find in him traces of the sort of wound, nor the tone of deep human melancholy that we find in this Complaint, and in the sonnet, "Why art thou silent.”

A. I do not remember that.

L. It is in the last published volume of his poems, though probably written many years before.

Why art thou silent? Is thy love a plant

Of such weak fibre that the treacherous air
Of absence withers what was once so fair?
Is there no debt to pay, no boon to grant?
Yet have my thoughts for thee been vigilant,

(As would my deeds have been) with hourly care,

The mind's least generous wish a mendicant

For naught but what thy happiness could spare.
Speak, though this soft warm heart, once free to hold

A thousand tender pleasures, thine and mine,

Be left more desolate, more dreary cold,

Than a forsaken bird's nest filled with snow,

Mid its own bush of leafless eglantine;

Speak, that my torturing doubts their end may know."

A. That is indeed the most pathetic description of the speechless palsy that precedes the death of love.

"Is there no debt to pay, no boon to grant ?"

But Laurie, how could you ever fancy a mind of poetic sensibility would be a stranger to this sort of sadness?

What signifies the security of a man's own position and choice? The peace and brightness of his own lot? If he has this intelligent sensibility can he fail to perceive the throb that agitates the bosom of all nature, or can his own fail to respond to it?