It was only some weeks after, when the written copy was left
to do all the work itself, that its foolish inadequacy was exposed.
"However, there is one consolation, they are not worse than Keats and
Shelley wrote at the same age," he said to himself, as he looked through
a bundle of the poor things the evening before his room was to be
dismantled. "Indeed, they couldn't be," he added, with a smile.
Fortunately he was but nineteen as yet; would he venture on a like
comparison were he twenty-five?
Yes, his little room was to be dismantled on the morrow,--this first
little private chapel of his spirit. This fair order of shelves, this
external harmony answering to an inner harmony of his spirit, were to be
broken up for ever. Often as he had sat in the folioed lamplit nook
which was, as it were, the very chancel of the little church, and gazed
in an ecstasy at the books, each with a great shining name of fame upon
its cover, it had seemed as though he had put his very soul outside him,
externalised it in this little corner of books and pictures. His soul
shivered, as one who must go houseless awhile, at the thought that
to-morrow its home would be no more.
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