He would mutter, “It is not right,” but what he meant I could not tell, unless he was thus--seventy years late--impatiently indignant at the passing of Shelley out of this earth. As likely as not he would forget his indignation, if such it was, by whispering--but not to me--with honied milky accents, as of one whose feet would refuse to crush a toad or bruise a flower: “Thou Friend, whose presence on my wintry heart Fell like bright Spring upon some herbless plain, How beautiful and calm and free thou wert In thy young wisdom, when the mortal chain Of custom thou didst burst and rend in twain, And walk as free as light the clouds among, Which many an envious slave then breath’d in vain From his dim dungeon, and my spirit sprung To meet thee from the woes which had begirt it long....” From Philip’s tone as he continued the poem, it might have been supposed that he, too, had a young and unloved wife, a rebellious father, a sweet-heart ready to fly with him in the manner suggested by some other lines which he uttered with conviction: “A ship is floating in the harbour now, A wind is hovering o’er the mountain’s brow; There is a path on the sea’s azure floor, No keel has ever ploughed the path before; The halcyons brood around the foamless isles; The treacherous ocean has forsworn its wiles; The merry mariners are bold and free: Say, my heart’s sister, wilt thou sail with me?” I have beside me the book which taught Philip this sad bliss, this wild wisdom. The fly-leaves are entirely covered by copies in his hand-writing of the best-loved poems and passages. Between some pages are still the scentless skeletons of flowers and leaves--still more pages bear the stains left by other flowers and leaves--plucked in that spring at Lydiard Constantine. The gilding of the covers for the most part is worn smoothly out; the edges are frayed, the corners broken. Thus the book seems less the work of Shelley than of Philip. It embalms that Spring. Yet why do I say embalmed? It is not dead. It lives while I live and can respond to the incantation of one of the poems in this little book, beginning: “Life of Life, thy lips enkindle, With their love the breath between them....” When I first heard them from Philip, Spring was thronging the land with delicious odours, colours, and sounds. I knew how nothing came, yet it was a sweet and natural coming rather than magic--a term then of too narrow application. As nearly as possible I step back those twenty years, and see the beech leaves under the white clouds in the blue and hear the wood wren amongst them, whenever by some chance or necessity I meet that incantation: “Life of Life, thy lips enkindle,” and I do not understand them any more than I do the Spring. Both have the power of magic....