Bones seldom delivers himself of his opinion in a hurry. “I think,” he says very deliberately, “that this, like many other absurdities of human nature, originates in that desire for the unattainable which is, after all, the mainspring of effort, improvement, and approach towards perfection. Man longs for the impossible, and what is so impossible as the past? That which hath vanished becomes therefore valuable, that which is hidden attractive, that which is distant desirable. There is a strange lay still existing by an old Provençal troubadour, no small favourite with iron-handed, lion-hearted King Richard, of which the refrain, ‘_so far away_,’ expresses very touchingly the longing for the absent, perhaps only _because_ absent, that is so painful, so human, and so unwise. The whole story is wild and absurd to a degree, yet not without a saddened interest, owing to the mournful refrain quoted above. It is thus told in the notes to Warton’s _History of English Poetry_:— “‘Jeffrey Rudell, a famous troubadour of Provence, who is also celebrated by Petrarch, had heard from the adventurers in the Crusades the beauty of a Countess of Tripoli highly extolled. He became enamoured from imagination, embarked for Tripoli, fell sick on the voyage through the fever of expectation, and was brought on shore at Tripoli, half-expiring. The countess, having received the news of the arrival of this gallant stranger, hastened to the shore and took him by the hand. He opened his eyes, and at once overpowered by his disease and her kindness, had just time to say inarticulately that _having seen her he died satisfied_. The countess made him a most splendid funeral, and erected to his memory a tomb of porphyry inscribed with an epitaph in Arabian verse. She commanded his sonnets to be richly copied and illuminated with letters of gold, was seized with a profound melancholy, and turned nun. I will endeavour to translate one of the sonnets he made on his voyage, “Yret et dolent m’en partray,” etc. It has some pathos and sentiment. “I should depart pensive but for this love of mine _so far away_, for I know not what difficulties I may have to encounter, my native land being _so far away_. Thou who hast made all things and who formed this love of mine _so far away_, give me strength of body, and then I may hope to see this love of mine _so far away_. Surely my love must be founded on true merit, as I love one _so far away_. If I am easy for a moment, yet I feel a thousand pains for her who is _so far away_. No other love ever touched my heart than this for her _so far away_. A fairer than she never touched any heart, either so near or _so far away_.’” “It is utter nonsense, I grant you, and the doings of this love-sick idiot seem to have been in character with his stanzas, yet is there a mournful pathos about that wailing _so far away_ which, well-worded, well-set, and well-performed, would make the success of a drawing-room song.