There were the classical translations that used to make him inaccurate, a scrap of a very boyish epic about King Arthur, beginning with a storm at Tintagel, sundry half ballads, the verses he was suspected of, and never would show, that first summer at Hollywell, and a very touching vision of his fair young mother. Except a translation or two, some words written to suit their favourite airs (a thing that used to seem to come as easily to him as singing to a bird), and a few lively mock heroic accounts of walks or parties, which had all been public property, there was no more that she could believe to have been composed till last year, for he was more disposed to versify in sorrow than in joy. There were a good many written during his loneliness, for his reflections had a tendency to flow into verse, and pouring them out thus had been a great solace. The lines were often imperfect and irregular, but not one that was not deep, pure, and genuine, and here and there scattered with passages of exquisite beauty and harmony, and full of power and grace. No one could have looked at them without owning in them the marks of a thorough poet, but this was not what the wife was seeking, and when she perceived it, though it made her face beam with a sort of satisfied pride, it was a secondary thing. She was studying not his intellect, but his soul; she did not care whether he would have been a poet, what she looked for was the record of the sufferings and struggles of the sad six months when his character was established, strengthened, and settled.
She found it. There was much to which she alone had the clue, too deep, and too obscurely hinted, to be understood at a glance. She met with such evidence of suffering as made her shudder and weep, tokens of the dark thoughts that had gathered round him, of the manful spirit of penitence and patience that had been his stay, and of the gleams that lighted his darkest hours, and showed he had never been quite forsaken. Now and then came a reference which brought home what he had told her; how the thought of his Verena had cheered him when he dared not hope she would be restored. Best of all were the lines written when the radiance of Christmas was, once for all, dispersing the gloom, and the vision opening on him, which he was now realizing. In reading them, she felt the same marvellous sympathy of subdued wondering joy in the victory of which she had partaken as she knelt beside his death-bed. These were the last. He had been too happy for poetry, except one or two scraps in Switzerland, and these had been hers from the time she had detected them.