There are times when the mirth of others only saddens us, especially the mirth of children with high spirits, that jar on our own quiet mood.  Gliding through a dense shrubbery, in which, though the lilacs were faded, the laburnum still retained here and there the waning gold of its clusters, Kenelm came into a recess which bounded his steps and invited him to repose.  It was a circle, so formed artificially by slight trellises, to which clung parasite roses heavy with leaves and flowers.  In the midst played a tiny fountain with a silvery murmuring sound; at the background, dominating the place, rose the crests of stately trees, on which the sunlight shimmered, but which rampired out all horizon beyond.  Even as in life do the great dominant passions—­love, ambition, desire of power, or gold, or fame, or knowledge—­form the proud background to the brief-lived flowerets of our youth, lift our eyes beyond the smile of their bloom, catch the glint of a loftier sunbeam, and yet—­and yet—­exclude our sight from the lengths and the widths of the space which extends behind and beyond them.

Kenelm threw himself on the turf beside the fountain.  From afar came the whoop and the laugh of the children in their sports or their dance.  At the distance their joy did not sadden him—­he marveled why; and thus, in musing reverie, thought to explain the why to himself.

“The poet,” so ran his lazy thinking, “has told us that ’distance lends enchantment to the view,’ and thus compares to the charm of distance the illusion of hope.  But the poet narrows the scope of his own illustration.  Distance lends enchantment to the ear as well as to the sight; nor to these bodily senses alone.  Memory, no less than hope, owes its charm to ‘the far away.’

“I cannot imagine myself again a child when I am in the midst of yon noisy children.  But as their noise reaches me here, subdued and mellowed; and knowing, thank Heaven! that the urchins are not within reach of me, I could readily dream myself back into childhood and into sympathy with the lost playfields of school.

“So surely it must be with grief:  how different the terrible agony for a beloved one just gone from earth, to the soft regret for one who disappeared into heaven years ago!  So with the art of poetry:  how imperatively, when it deals with the great emotions of tragedy, it must remove the actors from us, in proportion as the emotions are to elevate, and the tragedy is to please us by the tears it draws!  Imagine our shock if a poet were to place on the stage some wise gentleman with whom we dined yesterday, and who was discovered to have killed his father and married his mother.  But when Oedipus commits those unhappy mistakes nobody is shocked.  Oxford in the nineteenth century is a long way off from Thebes three thousand or four thousand years ago.