“The keep of the unconquerable mind”—
only to discover that it was clap-trap and stolen from Wordsworth at that. How, then, could he dare send off the sonnet—
“If all intent of unsubstantial art”—
and perhaps get it printed in the Nineteenth Century or the North American Review, when (for all he knew) it might really be very poor verse indeed?
These two things, then, his sloth and his hesitation in criticism, prevented Peter from sending out as much as he should have done. But one fine day of last summer, a kind of music passed into him from universal nature, and he sat down and wrote these remarkable lines:—
“He is not dead; the leaders do not die,
But rather, lapt in immemorial ease
Of merit consummate, they passing, stand;
And rapt from rude reality, remain;
And in the flux and eddy of time, are still.