Star-gazing, my Star? Would I were Heaven, to gaze on thee with many
eyes.
Such was my mood, a Hellenic mood, a mood summed up in that one word
[Greek: tetelestai] - not to be taken, however, in the sense of "all's
over." Quite the reverse! Did Shelley ever walk in like humour along
this canal? I doubt it. He lacked the master-key. An evangelist of a
kind, he was streaked, for all his paganism, with the craze of
world-improvement. One day he escaped from his chains into those
mountains and there beheld a certain Witch - only to be called back to
mortality by a domestic and critic-bitten lady. He tried to translate
the Symposium. He never tried to live it....
I have now interposed a day of rest.
My welcome in the villa situated in the street called after a certain
politician was that of the Prodigal Son. There was a look bordering on
affection in the landlady's eyes. She knew I would come back, once the
weather was warmer. She would now give me a cool room, instead of that
old one facing south. Those much-abused cement floors - they were not so
inconvenient, were they, at this season? The honey for breakfast?
Assuredly; the very same. And there was a tailor she had discovered in
the interval, cheaper and better than that other one, if anything
required attention.
And thus, having lived long at the mercy of London landladies and London
charwomen - having suffered the torments of Hell, for more years than I
care to remember, at the hands of these pickpockets and hags and harpies
and drunken sluts - I am now rewarded by the services of something at the
other end of the human scale.
