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 known yesterday, as a chaos out of which perhaps something was to be born. Yet the outside world was vaster than it had seemed when I could see three ranges of hills and guess at the sea beyond; and strange it was when the words—

came back to me. How frail and perilous and small was the poet's shielded world! The outside world threatened it as the smooth escarpment of tall, toppling water threatens the little piping sea-bird. And yet this poet's world was for the time being my life. Beyond his words there were, perhaps, the gay, the dear, the beautiful persons whom I knew; Nobby, the tinker, and many more; but probably they slept; they were vain if they were not fictitious; if they could be supposed to live, my only proof of it was that somehow they were connected with a very distant light that refused to go out among the westward copses. They were hardly more credible than the words of a stale preacher talking of charity, or an artful poet writing of love.

So I clung to Keats, the reality, until the road grew almost white, and under that broad oak some rational, nay, beautiful outlines begin to appear, which the shadow enveloped like a cocoon. The outlines were hardly built until they were seen to be a waggon, and its birth out of the shadow was a mighty thing that shared the idiom of stately trees and the motions of great waters and of cliffs that look on sunset and a noble sea. Dimly, uncertainly,