Mary went to the door with her brother, and, much to Minola's gratification, remained a long time talking with him there.
Miss Grey went to the piano and began to sing; softly to herself, that she might not be heard outside. The short autumnal day was already closing in London. Out in the country there would be two hours yet of light before the round, red sun went down behind the sloping fields, with the fresh upturned earth, and the clumps of trees, but here, in West-Central regions of London, the autumn day dies in its youth. The dusk already gathered around the singer, who sang to please or to soothe herself. In any troubled mood Miss Grey had long been accustomed to clear her spirits by singing to herself; and on many a long, dull Sunday at home—in the place that was called her home—she had committed the not impious fraud of singing her favorite ballads to slow, slow time, that they might be mistaken for hymns and pass unreproved. Her voice and way of singing made the song seem like a sweet, plaintive recitative, just the singing to hear in the "gloaming," to draw a few people hushed around it, and hold them in suspense, fearful to lose a single note, and miss the charm of expression. In truth, the charm of it sprang from the fact that the singer sang to express her own emotions, and thus every tone had its reality and its meaning. When women sing for a listening company, they sing conventionally, and in the way that some teacher has taught, or in what they believe to be the manner of some great artist; or they sing to somebody or at somebody, and in any case they are away from that truthfulness which in art is simply the faithful expression of real emotion. With Minola Grey singing was an end rather than a means; a relief in itself, a new mood in itself; a passing away from poor and personal emotions into ideal regions, where melancholy, if it must be, was always divine; and pain, if it would intrude, was purifying and ennobling. So, while the little poetess talked with her brother in the dusk, at the doorway, with the gas lamps just beginning to light the monotonous street, Minola was singing herself into the pure blue ether, above the fogs, and clouds, and discordant, selfish voices.
She came back to earth with something like a heavy fall, as Mary Blanchet ran in upon her in the dark and exclaimed—
"Now, do tell me—how do you like my brother?"
To say the truth, Miss Grey did not well know. "I wonder is he an Alceste?" she asked herself. On the whole, his coming had made an uncomfortable, anxious, uncanny impression upon her, and she looked back with a kind of hopeless regret on the days when she had London all to herself, and knew nobody.
WORDSWORTH'S CORRECTIONS.
When an author, in his later editions, departs from his earlier text, he is apt to reveal some traits of his method and genius that might not otherwise have been so evident, and a poet's corrections may thus have more than a merely curious interest. Take Mr. Tennyson's, for instance: "The Princess," to say nothing of his shorter emended poems, has been, one might say, rewritten since the first edition, and his corrections are always interesting. Yet they spring, I think, from a narrower range of motive than Wordsworth's; they are directed more exclusively toward the object of artistic finish; they commonly show the poet busied in casting perfume upon the lily. Take this example from "The Miller's Daughter." In the first version of that poem, as it appeared in 1842, we are told that before the heroine's reflection became visible in the mill-pool—
A water-rat from off the bank Plunged in the stream.
Later editions give us this more graceful version of what occurred: