Knowing all his earlier work before I knew him, I thought I detected a want of that profounder sympathy with humanity and the pathos of life which comes from actual suffering, and I remember saying to one of his admirers, before I saw him, that what he wanted to make him a great poet was suffering. This he had gained somewhat of when I made his acquaintance. His wife had died not long before I went to Cambridge to see him and to enlist his assistance in "The Crayon," and he was in the earliest phase of the reaction from a sorrow which had made him insist on solitude. All his surroundings had kept up the impressions of his bereavement, and all his associates sympathized with and respected it, and I came in with a new life just as he came to need relief from the depression which had become morbid. He has told it in one of his first letters to me:-- "I am glad you had a pleasant time here. I had, and you made me fifteen years younger while you stayed. When a man gets to my age, enthusiasms don't often knock at the door of his garret. I am all the more charmed with them when they come. A youth full of such pure intensity of hope and faith and purpose, what is he but the breath of a resurrection trumpet to us stiffened old fellows, bidding us up out of our clay and earth if we would not be too late? "Your inspiration is still to you a living mistress; make her immortal in her promptings and her consolations by imaging her truly in art. Mine looks at me with eyes of paler flame, and beckons across a gulf. You came into my loneliness like an incarnate inspiration. And it is dreary enough sometimes; for a mountain peak on whose snow your foot makes the first mortal print is not so lonely as a room full of happy faces from which one is missing forever." The tone of his life at that period is given in the few poems of the time, published later: the "Ode to Happiness," which he read to me unfinished during that first visit; "The Wind-Harp," in which "There murmured, as if one strove to speak, And tears came instead; then the sad tones wandered And faltered among the uncertain chords In a troubled doubt between sorrow and words; At last with themselves they questioned and pondered, 'Hereafter?--who knoweth?' and so they sighed Down the long steps that lead to silence and died;" "The Dead House," "Auf Wiedersehen (Summer)" and the "Palinode (Autumn)," in which the first grief had deepened while losing its acuteness, and the feeling of loneliness had taken largely the place of the first desolation, the wrenching apart of soul and body:-- "It is pagan; but wait till you feel it,-- That jar of our earth, that dull shock When the ploughshare of deeper passion Tears down to our primitive rock;" and some of his friends had tried the folly of condolence, to whom he replies, in the same poem ("After the Burial"):--