life.  Alas, as the days move on and the crisis delays, as life brings the need of labour, the necessity of earning money, as love and friendship lose their rosy glow and settle down into comfortable relations, the disillusionment spreads and widens.  I do not say that the nearer view of life is not more just, more wholesome, more manly.  It is but the working of some strictly determined law.  The dreams fade, become unreal and unsubstantial; though not rarely, in some glimpse of retrospect, the pilgrim turns, ascends a hillock by the road, and sees the far-off lines, the quiet folds, of the blue heights from which he descended in the blithe air of the morning, and knows that they were desirable.  Perhaps the happiest of all are those who, as the weary day advances, can catch a sight of some no less beautiful hills ahead of him, their hollows full of misty gold, where the long journey may end; and then, however wearily the sun falls on the dusty road and the hedged fields to left and right, he knows that the secrets of the earlier day are beautiful secrets still, and that the fine wonder of youth has yet to be satisfied.  And yet the shadow does undoubtedly fall heavily on the way for me and for such as me, whose one hope is that before they die they may make some delicate thing of beauty and delight which may remind those that come after that the first beauty of opening light and the song of the awakening bird is a real and true thing, not a mere effect of air and sun and buoyant spirit.  Experience and fact and hard truth have a beauty of their own, no doubt.  Politics and commerce, the growth of social liberty and law, civic duty and responsibility—­dull words for noble things—­have their place, their value, their significance.  But to the poet they seem only the laborious organising of his dreams, the slow and clumsy manufacture of what ought to be instinctive and natural.  If the world must grow upon these lines, if men must toil in smoke-stained factories or wrangle in heated Parliaments, then it is well that the framework of life should be made as firm, as compact, as just as it can.  But not here does his hope lie; he looks forward to a far different regeneration than can be effected by law and police.  He looks forward to a time when the hearts of men shall be so wise and tender and simple that they shall smile at the thought that life needs all this organising and arranging.  For those who labour for social good lose sight too often of the end in the means.  They think of education as a business of delightful intricacy, and forget that it is but an elaborate device for teaching men to love quiet labour and to enjoy the delight of leisure.  They lose themselves in the dry delight of codifying law, and forget that law is only necessary because men are born brutal and selfish.  Morality may be imposed from without, or grace may grow from within; and the poet is on the side of the inner grace, because he thinks that if it can be achieved it will outrun the other lightly and easily.