CHAPTER XV 



'THE DEWY MORN' 



' The Dewy Morn,' originally written several years 

 before, but certainly revised, was published in 1884. 

 The manuscript was first sent to Messrs. Longman 

 from Brighton in December, 1883, with a note request- 

 ing that it shall not be given to a Tory reader, ' or 

 it will be condemned without mercy.' A large part 

 of it was almost certainly rewritten in its present form 

 at about the same time as ' The Story of My Heart.' 

 It has much of the same emotional thought ; it has the 

 same passion and impetuosity in style. Returning as he 

 did so often in ' The Story of My Heart ' to his youth, he 

 put his memories and his mature divinations into the 

 heroine of ' The Dewy Morn,' the beautiful country girl 

 Felise. In women he found the beauty he saw and loved 

 in Nature, as if, indeed, they were made, as Blodeuwedd 

 was made by Gwydion, of the blossoms of the oak and 

 the blossoms of the broom and the blossoms of the 

 meadow-sweet, but with an added solemnity as of the 

 mountains and of light upon great waters. Perhaps he 

 had found more in one woman than in any other human 

 beings : certain it is that he early began to draw, or try to 

 draw, women of singular beauty and character, with a 

 vigour and originality, as in the Georgiana of his ' Restless 

 Human Hearts,' beyond the man. Cicely Luckett is a 

 fair, happy, sun-sweet shadow of a character. Frances in 

 ' Bevis ' is only pretty and female. In some of his Brighton 

 essays his admiration of well-dressed women riding or 



224 



