great poets, and great painters, some of whose names you may not have heard.  But when you do hear of them I beg of you not to regard any of them as symptoms of decay, even if their technique is elaborate and over-wrought.  The early work of every modern painter is over-elaborate and over-wrought, just as all the work of early painters is over-elaborate and over-wrought.  Do not greet the dawn as though it were a lowering sunset.  Listen, and, with William Blake, you may hear the sons of God shouting for joy.  If your mind is bent on decay, read that neglected poet, Byron.  He thought the romantic movement, of which he became the accidental centre, a symptom of decay.  Read any period of history and its literature, and you will find the same cry reiterated.  When you have read an old book go out and buy a new one.  When you have sold your old masters, go out and buy new masters.  Aladdin’s maid is one of the wronged characters of legend. . . .  Of the Pierian spring there are many fountains.  Yet it is a spring which never runs dry; though it flows with greater freedom at one season than at another, with greater volume from one fountain than some other.  In the glens of Parnassus there are hidden flowers always blooming; though, to the binoculars of the tourist, the mountain seems unusually barren.  You will find that youth does not vanish with the rose, that you need never close the sweet-scented manuscript of love, science, art or literature.  In them youth returns like daffodils that come before the swallow dares, and take the winds of March with beauty:  or like the snapdragons which Cardinal Newman saw blossoming on the wall at Oxford, and which became for him the symbol of hope.  For us they may stand as the symbol of realisation and the immortality of the human intellect, in which there has been no decay since the days of Tubal Cain.

To J. G. LEGGE, ESQ.