her flowery labyrinths, unrolling her arcana gorgeous with scutcheons of purpose and performance, and filling him with the lore of her mystic ways, when the Ghost also had the keys, turned them softly in the wards, and entered with him, diffusing her dark effluence over all things, like a blot? What cup ever brimmed at his lips, but the Ghost had first distilled her drop of refined poison there? He was a man into whose composition large passion and quick resolution had entered; but now, like a cloud borrowing shape from the underlying promontory, as if she were real, he fleeting and false, he forsook all choice, assumed her shifting habit, and veered with the veering Ghost.

II.

OVER THE HILLS AND FAR AWAY.

NE summer day, buried in the deep ferns

ON

of a high common, the warm, sweet breeze streaming in long wafts above him, many hours he lay fingering restlessly at the little mosses and dainty violets, face downward, lest glancing up he should see the Ghost where she sat, so white and thin that the sunshine fell through her delicate texture upon the flowers he touched, her fingers lying wearily also upon the violets, while her sad eyes weighed him down with their flickering but tireless gaze. The hum of innumerable insects rose around him, and the long emerald lances of strange flies hurtled beyond; now and then a lark dropped a strain of song down from some covert in the skies, or a nightingale in its low nest twittered faintly through the noon a breath of melody, and hushed itself again. Sir Rohan's

heart, which had been so long torpid, opened anew, and became warmed and filled with the sweet influences of nature; the richness of the matured year, in the gorgeous pageant of its summer, defiled across his senses; all the beauty to which he had been insensible unsheathed itself and flashed through his soul; the growth of a weary while at last accomplished itself, and in the long hours of that balmy day he believed the artist to have been born. Years seemed to have passed since he wandered out upon the common, and the early morning, with its dew and fragrance, loomed as far off as the purple inlands do to sea-coast mariners; again he had a purpose.

Refusing to give credence to the doubt that the Ghost could not thus be laid, he rose and pursued his way with uplifted head and elastic step; nor was he conscious how steadily he gazed before him, turning neither to right nor left, lest the accursed object should meet his eyes, nor how unequal the quick beatings of his heart made the chant he hummed, and, lest any rustle and flow of drapery beside him should fill its intervals, that he hummed unbrokenly. Under

his doorway, he paused and turned back a glance on the gathering twilight. A cold touch fell upon his wrist, growing bolder till the long fingers closed their icy grasp around it; constrained, he met the shadowy eyes that hovered and grew still close before his own. A bale-fire for a moment glowed within them, fading to a dead glare and then sinking into obscurity, while the appalling grasp loosened, the touch ceased, and through the darkness of the night nothing was to be seen but the evening star hanging and trembling just above the gray horizon. Perhaps it was the Ghost's farewell. A new sense of freedom suffused his being, and he laughed a long and bitter laugh as he leaned scornfully against the wall. Could the Ghost have left a companionship such as that? Perhaps by absence she renewed her power, or peradventure she was journeying.

That night Sir Rohan slept well, and as if bathed in rejuvenescence he met the morning light, full of fresh strength and courage. A tedious initiation lay before him, but he had patience for it, since true genius is well content to wear the harness for a while, that its strength

may be made available,

-and so at first he groped

that he at last might soar.

Time was valueless to him; and whatever hours elapsed ere he had mastered his art, he did not count them, but in his freedom, and as he would say, drawing in his breath exultingly, in his solitude, he began and pursued his task. Day by day found him before his easel. The first song of dawn spread softest shades of unattainable color before his thought, the vertical rays of noon toned his visions down to subdued splendor, and sunset found and gave him those brilliant dyes in which few artists have dipped the brush. Sir Rohan's reach was high indeed; what he brought down and spread upon his canvas he hardly dared hope would prove commensurate with his conceptions, nor that he could make others see what to him had such distinct and beautiful reality. •

It was merely an ideal, allegoric in its nature, on which he at last expended the mature flow of his skill and imagination. Through it he designed to illustrate a truth, although he had not sufficiently freed his mind-unbiased enough generally from the puerile conceits of fancy