“‘A portal as of shadowy adamant Stands yawning on the highway of the life Which we all tread, a cavern huge and gaunt; Around it rages an unceasing strife Of shadows, like the restless clouds that haunt The gap of some cleft mountain, lifted high Into the whirlwind of the upper sky. And many pass it by with careless tread, Not knowing that a shadowy....’ A shadowy _what_, Arthur? At any rate that is the place.” In those days, Philip was beginning to love Shelley more than he loved Aurelius or me. I had not seen that pile before. With little trouble I could have located it almost exactly: I might have known that the particular street had no room for a sublimer St Michael’s Mount. If we passed the spot during the next few days we made no use of the evidence against the tower, which satisfied us in varying degrees until in process of time it took its place among the other chimney clusters of our horizon. I was not disillusioned as to this piece of fancy’s architecture, nor was I thereafter any more inclined to take a surveyor’s view of the surface of the earth. Stranger things, probably, than St Michael’s Mount have been thought and done in that street: we did not know it, but our eyes accepted this symbol of them with gladness, as in the course of nature. Not much less fantastic was our world than the one called up by lights seen far off before a traveller in a foreign and a dark, wild land. Therefore Spring at Lydiard Constantine was to Philip and me more than a portion of a regular renascence of Nature. It was not an old country marvellously at length arraying itself after an old custom, but an invasion of the old as violent as our suburban St Michael’s Mount. It was as if the black, old, silent earth had begun to sing as sweet as when Jessie sang unexpectedly “Blow away the morning dew.” It was not a laborious, orderly transformation, but a wild, divine caprice. We supposed that it would endure for ever, though it might (as I see now) have turned in one night to Winter. But it did not. That Spring was a poet’s Spring. “Remember this Spring,” wrote Aurelius in a letter, “then you will know what a poet means when he says _Spring_.” Mr Stodham, who was not a poet, but wrote verse passionately, was bewildered by it, and could no longer be kept from exposing his lines. He called the Spring both fiercely joyous, and melancholy. He addressed it as a girl, and sometimes as a thousand gods. He said that it was as young as the dew-drop freshly globed on the grass tip, and also as old as the wind. He proclaimed that it had conquered the earth, and that it was as fleeting as a poppy. He praised it as golden, as azure, as green, as snow-white, as chill and balmy, as bright and dim, as swift and languid, as kindly and cruel, as true and fickle. Yet he certainly told an infinitely small part of the truth concerning that Spring. It is memorable to me chiefly on account of a great poet.