mesmeric discourse’ of one’s friend.  All this, and the rest of the serene and happy inspired daily life which a piece of ‘unpunctuality’ can ruin, and to which the guardian ‘angel’ brings as crowning qualification the knack of poking the fire adroitly—­of this—­what can one say but that—­no, best hold one’s tongue and read the ‘Lyrical Ballads’ with finger in ear.  Did not Shelley say long ago ’He had no more imagination than a pint-pot’—­though in those days he used to walk about France and Flanders like a man? Now, he is ‘most comfortable in his worldly affairs’ and just this comes of it!  He lives the best twenty years of his life after the way of his own heart—­and when one presses in to see the result of the rare experiment ... what the one alchemist whom fortune has allowed to get all his coveted materials and set to work at last in earnest with fire and melting-pot—­what he produces after all the talk of him and the like of him; why, you get pulvis et cinis—­a man at the mercy of the tongs and shovel!

Well!  Let us despair at nothing, but, wishing success to the newer aspirant, expect better things from Miss M. when the ‘knoll,’ and ‘paradise,’ and their facilities, operate properly; and that she will make a truer estimate of the importance and responsibilities of ‘authorship’ than she does at present, if I understand rightly the sense in which she describes her own life as it means to be; for in one sense it is all good and well, and quite natural that she should like ‘that sort of strenuous handwork’ better than book-making; like the play better than the labour, as we are apt to do.  If she realises a very ordinary scheme of literary life, planned under the eye of God not ‘the public,’ and prosecuted under the constant sense of the night’s coming which ends it good or bad—­then, she will be sure to ‘like’ the rest and sport—­teaching her maids and sewing her gloves and making delicate visitors comfortable—­so much more rational a resource is the worst of them than gin-and-water, for instance.  But if, as I rather suspect, these latter are to figure as a virtual half duty of the whole Man—­as of equal importance (on the ground of the innocence and utility of such occupations) with the book-making aforesaid—­always supposing that to be of the right kind—­then I respect Miss M. just as I should an Archbishop of Canterbury whose business was the teaching A.B.C. at an infant-school—­he who might set on the Tens to instruct the Hundreds how to convince the Thousands of the propriety of doing that and many other things.  Of course one will respect him only the more if when that matter is off his mind he relaxes at such a school instead of over a chess-board; as it will increase our love for Miss M. to find that making ’my good Jane (from Tyne-mouth)’—­’happier and—­I hope—­wiser’ is an amusement, or more, after the day’s progress towards the ‘novel for next year’ which is to inspire thousands, beyond computation, with