I wonder how the great artists worked, and under what circumstances
they threw aside the implements of their craft, impatient of all but
the throb of life itself? Could Raphael paint Madonnas the week of
his betrothal? Did Thackeray write a chapter the day his daughter
was born? Did Plato philosophise freely when he was in love? Were
there interruptions in the world's great revolutions, histories,
dramas, reforms, poems, and marbles when their creators fell for a
brief moment under the spell of the little blind tyrant who makes
slaves of us all? It must have been so. Your chronometer heart, on
whose pulsations you can reckon as on the procession of the
equinoxes, never gave anything to the world unless it were a system
of diet, or something quite uncoloured and unglorified by the
imagination.



Chapter XX. A canticle to Jane.



There are many donkeys owned in these nooks among the hills, and
some of the thriftier families keep donkey-chairs (or 'cheers,' as
they call them) to let to the casual summer visitor. This vehicle
is a regular Bath chair, into which the donkey is harnessed. Some
of them have a tiny driver's seat, where a small lad sits beating
and berating the donkey for the incumbent, generally a decrepit
dowager from London. Other chairs are minus this absurd coachman's
perch, and in this sort I take my daily drives. I hire the
miniature chariot from an old woman who dwells at the top of Gorse