Insomuch as poetic dreams and aspirations can make a man a poet, Eustace Thorburn was a member of that glorious brotherhood which began with Homer; but it yet remained to be shown whether he were gifted with something more than the vague yearnings and lofty imaginings of the dreamer who would fain admit the world within the mystic portals of his fair shadowland. To think high thoughts, to dream delicious dreams, is one thing; but to be able to translate thought and dream into the eloquent verse of a Byron, or the polished syllables of a Tennyson, is another thing. To how many eyes the Coliseum and the Adriatic, the Drachenfels and the quiet field that lies beyond Ardennes, may have seemed as fair as they appeared to the eyes of that one lonely traveller who has recorded his wanderings in words that can never die! How many brains must have been crowded by grand imaginings, how many hearts must have beat high with the dreamer’s enthusiasm, as the youth of England have trodden the ground that is hallowed by the footsteps of heroes and demigods! and yet, of all the youth of England, there has been but one whose poetic record of his emotions has reached a second edition, and held a place in the memory of mankind. Of all the men who read the rugged legends of Macbeth and Lear, the Italian story of Othello’s passion and Iago’s cunning, there was only one man who could give to the crude unshapely records life and form, immortal as his own genius! Whether Eustace Thorburn possessed that subtle and wondrous power of expression, that mystic sympathy with the minds of his fellowmen, that marvellous perception which is a kind of clairvoyance, time alone could show. He had his moments of proud hope, his hours of abject depression; but he worked on patiently, steadily, devoting more than one quiet hour of every night to the composition of a narrative poem--dramatic, philosophical, passionate, and perhaps just a little tainted with the egotism which is so common in the work of youthful genius. Eustace Thorburn had no suspicion that the hero of his poetic fiction was a shadow of himself, a projection of his own brain; but he knew that the heroine was an airy sister of Helen de Bergerac, and that the love of his Egbert for his Amy was very near akin to his own love for Helen.