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detraction which yet affects its object; and, feeling hurt in his fringilline amour propre, he has all at once taken himself off. Never mind; a better singer has succeeded him. I have heard and seen the little wren a dozen times to-day; now he has come to the upper part of the tree I am lying under, and although so near his voice sounds scarcely louder than before. This is also a lyric, but of another kind. It is not plaintive, nor passionate; nor is it so spontaneous as the warbling of the robin--that most perfect feathered impressionist; nor is it endeared to me by early associations since I listened in boyhood to the songs of other wrens. In what, then, does its charm consist? I do not know. Certainly it is delicate, and may even be described as brilliant, in its limited way perfect, and to other greater songs like the small pimpernel to a poppy or a hollyhock. Unambitious, yet finished, it has the charm of distinction. The wren is the least self-conscious of our singers. Somewhere among the higher green translucent leaves the little brown barred thing is quietly sitting, busy for the nonce about nothing, dreaming his summer dream, and unknowingly telling it aloud. When shall
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we have symbols to express as perfectly our summer-feeling--our dream ?
That small song has served to remind me of two small books I brought into the garden to read--the works of two modern minor poets whose "wren-like warblings," I imagined, would suit my mood and the genial morning better than the stirring or subtle thoughts of greater singers. Possibly in that I was mistaken; for there until now lie the books neglected on a lawn chair within reach of my hand. The chair was dragged hither half-an-hour ago by a maiden all in white, who appeared half inclined to share the mulberry shade with me. She did not continue long in that mind. In a lively manner, she began speaking of some trivial thing; but after a very few moments all interest in the subject evaporated, and she sat humming some idle air, tapping the turf with her fantastic shoe. Presently she picked up one of my books, opened it at random and read a line or two, her vermilion under-lip curling slightly; then threw it down again, and glanced at me out of the corners of her eyes; then hummed again, and finally became silent, and sat bending forward a little, her dark lustrous eyes gazing with
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strange intentness through the slight screen of foliage into the vacant space beyond. What to see? The poet has omitted to tell us to what the maiden's fancy lightly turns in spring. Doubtless it turns to thoughts of something real. Life is real; so is passion--the quickening of the blood, the wild pulsation. But the pleasures and pains of the printed book are not real, and are to reality like Japanese flowers made of coloured bits of tissue paper to the living fragrant flowers that bloom to-day and perish to-morrow; they are a simulacrum, a mockery, and present to us a pale phantasmagoric world, peopled with bloodless men and women that chatter meaningless things and laugh without joy. The feeling of unreality affects us all at times, but in very different degrees. And perhaps I was too long a doer, herding too much with narrow foreheads, drinking too deeply of the sweet and bitter cup, to experience that pure unfailing delight in literature which some have. Its charm, I fancy, is greatest to those in whom the natural man, deprived in early life of his proper aliment, grows sickly and pale, and perishes at last of inanition. There is ample room then for the latter higher growth--