The Time is Out of Joint

Treacheries of Silence

Gone Like a Dream

Grey Departure

Ah Me, the Might-have-been!

A Messenger of Glad Tidings

Not Words, but Hands Meeting

A Dream of Woods and of Love

vii

THE ARGUMENT

Keats.

ix

INTRODUCTORY

Concerning Bindon-Cheveral.

An ancient gateway, looking as though it were closed for ever; with its carved stone pillar bramble-grown, its scrolled ironwork yielded to silence and immobility, to crumbling rust—and through the bars the wild imprisoned garden....

The haunting of the locked door, of the condemned apartment in a house of life and prosperity, how unfailingly it appeals to the romantic fibre! Yet, more suggestive still, in the heart of a rich and trim estate, is the forbidden garden jealously walled, sternly abandoned, weed-invaded, falling (and seemingly conscious of its own doom) into a rank desolation. The hidden room is enigmatic enough, but how stirring to the fancy this peep of condemned ground, descried through bars of such graceful design as could only have been once conceived for the portals of a garden of delight!—Thus stands, in the midst of the nurtured pleasaunces of Bindon-Cheveral, the curvetting iron gate leading to the 

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