It is well for me that I cannot hear music when I will; assuredly I should not have such intense pleasure as comes to me now and then by haphazard.  As I walked on, forgetting all about the distance, and reaching home before I knew I was half way there, I felt gratitude to my unknown benefactor—­a state of mind I have often experienced in the days long gone by.  It happened at times—­not in my barest days, but in those of decent poverty—­that some one in the house where I lodged played the piano—­and how it rejoiced me when this came to pass!  I say “played the piano”—­a phrase that covers much.  For my own part, I was very tolerant; anything that could by the largest interpretation be called music, I welcomed and was thankful; for even “five-finger exercises” I found, at moments, better than nothing.  For it was when I was labouring at my desk that the notes of the instrument were grateful and helpful to me.  Some men, I believe, would have been driven frantic under the circumstances; to me, anything like a musical sound always came as a godsend; it tuned my thoughts; it made the words flow.  Even the street organs put me in a happy mood; I owe many a page to them—­written when I should else have been sunk in bilious gloom.

More than once, too, when I was walking London streets by night, penniless and miserable, music from an open window has stayed my step, even as yesterday.  Very well can I remember such a moment in Eaton Square, one night when I was going back to Chelsea, tired, hungry, racked by frustrate passions.  I had tramped miles and miles, in the hope of wearying myself so that I could sleep and forget.  Then came the piano notes—­I saw that there was festival in the house—­and for an hour or so I revelled as none of the bidden guests could possibly be doing.  And when I reached my poor lodgings, I was no longer envious nor mad with desires, but as I fell asleep I thanked the unknown mortal who had played for me, and given me peace.

XXVII.

To-day I have read The Tempest.  It is perhaps the play that I love best, and, because I seem to myself to know it so well, I commonly pass it over in opening the book.  Yet, as always in regard to Shakespeare, having read it once more, I find that my knowledge was less complete than I supposed.  So it would be, live as long as one might; so it would ever be, whilst one had strength to turn the pages and a mind left to read them.

I like to believe that this was the poet’s last work, that he wrote it in his home at Stratford, walking day by day in the fields which had taught his boyhood to love rural England.  It is ripe fruit of the supreme imagination, perfect craft of the master hand.  For a man whose life’s business it has been to study the English tongue, what joy can equal that of marking the happy ease wherewith Shakespeare surpasses, in mere command of words, every achievement of those