‘My dear Friend,—What would you say, and what would Wordsworth say, if I throw what follows into verse? Perhaps you would not recommend it. Besides, the thought is yours, and to be twice stolen is a fate reserved only for the bronze horses of Lysippus.
‘When first we come, a light divine is on all Nature—on earth, and sea, and sky; but, like the Bologna-stone in the dark, we shed it all ourselves. It came with us; it issues from us; and soon, like that stone of lustre, we shed it no longer. It grows fainter and fainter, and at last it dies. Where we imbibed it, we know not. We did not find it here; and when it goes, nothing, nothing can bring it back again. It goes, leaving us to all the flat realities of this life; and nothing can supply its place but the opening gleams of a better.
‘If you don’t mean to use it yourself, perhaps you will help me a little.’
