' THE STORY OF MY HEART ' 179 



what he hked, and found his food in the oddest ways, yet 

 was hkely to go far astray. His judgment, too, was 

 uncertain ; in one of his letters* he complains of a 

 reviewer (not of one of his own books) in the Athenceum 

 simply on the ground that public opinion was all against 

 him. He had, however, by the constant necessity of 

 moulding language to fit a more and more subtle subject- 

 matter, become the master — -the still rather uncertain 

 master — of an easy, delicate, often sweet and, without 

 extravagance, luxuriant style. It was not, I think, 

 developed by much conscious effort, but grew to his use 

 like the handle of a walking-stick. It is at times grossly 

 careless in construction and in sound, probably because 

 he often wrote in haste or in an uneasy state. But, 

 given an entirely suitable subject, he wrote with a natural 

 fineness and richness and a carelessness, too, like the 

 blackbird's singing. He rises and falls with his subject 

 more than most writers, for his style was not a garment 

 in which he clothed everything indiscriminately. Reading 

 had given him his vocabulary, but no one model. Parts 

 of * The Poacher ' and ' A Great Estate ' could not be 

 bettered, but his style afterwards left what seemed the 

 maturity of those books, and went through another 

 apprenticeship, and absorbed new orders of sensations and 

 emotions. His eyesight won fields unknown to him 

 before, both out of doors and in the British Museum and 

 the picture-galleries. Of his peculiar sensitiveness — 

 though to which of the senses it is to be referred I do not 

 know — he gives an instance in the migratory impulse men- 

 tioned in ' January in the Sussex Woods.' ' I am,' he 

 writes, ' personally subject twice a year to the migratory 

 impulse. I feel it in spring and autumn, say about 

 March, when the leaves begin to appear, and again as the 

 corn is carried, and most strongly as the fields are left in 

 stubble. I have felt it every year since boyhood, often so 

 powerfully as to be quite unable to resist it. Go I must, 

 and go I do, somewhere ; if I do not, I am soon unwell. 



* To Mr. C- J. Longman. 



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