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"Then spake I with my tongue." I would have liked to do that. But I could do nothing; only pray. I was very much startled while I sat in my muse, to bear a footstep coming. A steady, regular, footstep; no light trip of children; and the hands were in the field, and this was not a step like any of them. My first thought was, the overseer! come to spy me out.
Philip was waiting at the front door, with his essays and his prose symphonies and his satirical novel the satire of a young man is apt to be very bitter but it was as tightly shut against him as if a publisher and not the muse of literature kept the door.
For they, as well as he, were making sheep's eyes at those wonderful visions in golden locks and jetty locks, with brown eyes and blue eyes, with fluttering ribbons and snowy pinafores, known as "Miss Jane Mackenzie's girls," who were the inspiration of most of their poet-chum's invocations of the muse.
And she found much more time for these pleasures than her junior officer, Miss Amory's maid, who seldom could be spared for a holiday, and was worked as hard as any factory-girl by that inexorable little Muse, her mistress. The Muse loved to be dressed becomingly, and, having a lively fancy and a poetic desire for change, was for altering her attire every day.
"No, no; not I. The muse has given me the go-by completely. Except for some occasional verses for a school festival or something of the kind, which I grind out now and then, I've sunk my rhyming dictionary deeper than ever plummet sounded.
He lashed the vices of the age, tho' with a merciful hand; for his muse was good-natured, not abounding over-much with gall, tho' he has been blamed for it by the critics: It has been objected to him, that he was too hasty in his productions; but by such only who are admirers of stiff and elaborate performances, since with a person of a sprightly fancy, those things are often best, that are struck off in a heat . It is thought that in all his heroes, he generally sketched out his own character, of a young, gay, rakish spark, blessed with parts and abilities.
The brothers were astonished; but when he said in their own German tongue: 'Friends, why do you muse so silently? his voice sounded in their ears like the church-bells of Augsburg. 'We have cause for silence and musing, friend, said Christopher. 'And what is your business with us? demanded the fiery Hubert.
There are many things plead strongly against it; the uncertainty of getting soon into business; the consequences of my follies, which may perhaps make it impracticable for me to stay at home; and, besides, I have for some time been pining under secret wretchedness, from causes which you pretty well know the pang of disappointment, the sting of pride, with some wandering stabs of remorse, which never fail to settle on my vitals like vultures, when attention is not called away by the calls of society, or the vagaries of the muse.
It may be suspected that he read more literature than law during these years, and we notice that he did not go, like Emerson, to the great fountain-heads of poetry, to Homer or Dante, Shakespeare or Goethe, but courted the muse rather among such tributaries as Virgil, Moliere, Chaucer, Keats, and Lessing.
So wedded was he to literary composition that he learnt the Sarmatian language and wrote poems in it in honour of Augustus, the loss of which, from a philological point of view, is greatly to be regretted. His muse must be considered as at home in the salons find fashionable coteries of the great. Though his style is so facile, it is by no means simple.
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