“I do not forget. But if youth and summer
fade for you, you leave youth and summer behind you
as you pass along,—behind in hearts which
mere realism would make always old, and counting their
slothful beats under the gray of a sky without sun
or stars; wherefore I pray you to consider how magnificent
a mission the singer’s is,—to harmonize
your life with your song, and toss your flowers, as
your child does, heavenward, with heavenward eyes.
Think only of this when you talk with my sorrowing
friend, and you will do him good, as you have done
me, without being able to guess how a seeker after
the Beautiful, such as you, carries us along with
him on his way; so that we, too, look out for beauty,
and see it in the wild-flowers to which we had been
blind before.”
Here Tom entered the little sanded parlour where this
dialogue had been held, and the three men sallied
forth, taking the shortest cut from the town into
the fields and woodlands.
WHETHER or not his spirits were raised by Kenelm’s
praise and exhortations, the minstrel that day talked
with a charm that spellbound Tom, and Kenelm was satisfied
with brief remarks on his side tending to draw out
the principal performer.
The talk was drawn from outward things, from natural
objects,—objects that interest children,
and men who, like Tom Bowles, have been accustomed
to view surroundings more with the heart’s eye
than the mind’s eye. This rover about the
country knew much of the habits of birds and beasts
and insects, and told anecdotes of them with a mixture
of humour and pathos, which fascinated Tom’s
attention, made him laugh heartily, and sometimes
brought tears into his big blue eyes.
They dined at an inn by the wayside, and the dinner
was mirthful; then they wended their way slowly back.
By the declining daylight their talk grew somewhat
graver, and Kenelm took more part in it. Tom
listened mute,—still fascinated. At
length, as the town came in sight, they agreed to
halt a while, in a bosky nook soft with mosses and
sweet with wild thyme.
There, as they lay stretched at their ease, the birds
hymning vesper songs amid the boughs above, or dropping,
noiseless and fearless, for their evening food on
the swards around them, the wanderer said to Kenelm,
“You tell me that you are no poet, yet I am sure
you have a poet’s perception: you must
have written poetry?”
“Not I; as I before told you, only school verses
in dead languages: but I found in my knapsack
this morning a copy of some rhymes, made by a fellow-collegian,
which I put into my pocket meaning to read them to
you both. They are not verses like yours, which
evidently burst from you spontaneously, and are not
imitated from any other poets. These verses were
written by a Scotchman, and smack of imitation from
the old ballad style. There is little to admire
in the words themselves, but there is something in
the idea which struck me as original, and impressed
me sufficiently to keep a copy, and somehow or other
it got into the leaves of one of the two books I carried
with me from home.”
