night in my dark little room in Serle Street, although of course it
was a long while after the poem made its appearance. Wonderful!
What did I see as I stood at my desk in my Serle Street bedroom?


"Day!
Faster and more fast,
O'er night's brim, day boils at last;
Boils, pure gold, o'er the cloud-cup's brim
Where spurting and suppresst it lay--"


There on the horizon lies the cloud cup. Over the brim boils, pure
gold, the day! The day which is before me is Pippa's day, and not a
day in the Strand: it is a "twelve-hours treasure": I am as eager
as Pippa "not to squander a wavelet of thee". The vision still
lives. The friend who stood by my side is still with me, although
he died years and years ago. What was true of me was true of half a
score of my friends. If it is true that the Victorian time was ugly
and vulgar, it was the time of the Virginians, of David Copperfield,
of Tennyson's Poems, of Cromwell's Letters and Speeches, of the
Letters and Life of Lord Bacon, of Emerson's Essays, of Festus, of
the Dramatis Personae, and of the Apologia. We were at the Academy
at eight o'clock on a May morning to see, at the very earliest
moment, the Ophelia, the Order for Release, the Claudio and
Isabella, Seddon's Jerusalem, Lewis's Arab Scribe and his Frank
Encampment in the Desert. The last two, though, I think, were in
the exhibition of the Old Water Colour Society. The excitement of
those years between 1848 and 1890 was, as I have said, something
like that of a religious revival, but it was reasonable.