THE ARGUMENT I have clung To nothing, lov’d a nothing, nothing seen Or felt but a great dream! O I have been Presumptuous against love, against the sky, Against all elements, against the tie Of mortals each to each.... ... Against his proper glory Has my soul conspired; so my story Will I to children utter, and repent. There never lived a mortal man, who bent His appetite beyond his natural sphere But starv’d and died.... Here will I kneel, for thou redeemest hast My life from too thin breathing: gone and past Are cloudy phantasms! —KEATS. INTRODUCTORY CONCERNING BINDON-CHEVERAL. _An ancient gateway, looking as though it were closed for ever; with its carved stone pillar bramble-grown, its scrolled ironwork yielded to silence and immobility, to crumbling rust—and through the bars the wild imprisoned garden...._ _The haunting of the locked door, of the condemned apartment in a house of life and prosperity, how unfailingly it appeals to the romantic fibre! Yet, more suggestive still, in the heart of a rich and trim estate, is the forbidden garden jealously walled, sternly abandoned, weed-invaded, falling (and seemingly conscious of its own doom) into a rank desolation. The hidden room is enigmatic enough, but how stirring to the fancy this peep of condemned ground, descried through bars of such graceful design as could only have been once conceived for the portals of a garden of delight!—Thus stands, in the midst of the nurtured pleasaunces of Bindon-Cheveral, the curvetting iron gate leading to the close known on the estate as the Garden of Herbs—a place of mystery always, as reported by tradition; and, by the legend touching certain events in the life of one of its owners, a place of somewhat sinister repute. Even in the eyes of the casual visitor it has all the air of_ _Some complaining dim retreat For fear and melancholy meet._ _And in truth_ (_being fain to pursue the quotation further_) _I blame them not Whose fancy in this lonely spot Was moved._