It was a voice from the sad modern world she knew so well, and in
spite of its form (which was a little too neo-classic and conventional
to please her) she felt it to be a cry from the heart of a living man.
That man she had identified with the boy her grandfather had found,
years ago, in a City bookshop. There had been no room for doubt on
that point when she saw him in the flush of his intellectual passion,
bursting so joyously, so preposterously, into Greek. He had,
therefore, already a certain claim on her attention. Besides, he
seemed to be undergoing some incomprehensible struggle which she
conceived to be of a moral nature, and she had been sorry for him on
that account.
But, if he were also--Was it possible that her grandfather's
marvellous boy had grown into her cousin's still more marvellous man?
Horace, too, had made his great discovery in a City shop. _Helen in
Leuce_ and a City shop--it hardly amounted to proof; but, if it did,
what then? Oh then, she was still more profoundly sorry for him. For
then he was a modern poet, which in the best of circumstances is to be
marked for suffering. And to Mr. Rickman circumstances had not been
exactly kind.
A modern poet, was he? One whom the gods torment with inspired and
hopeless passion; a lover of his own "fugitive and yet eternal bride,"
the Helen of Homer, of AEschylus and Euripides, the Helen of Marlowe
and Goethe, the Helen of them all. And for Mr.
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