found. It can only be thus, by a long-continued and indefatigable process of consideration and reflection, that so perfect a harmony between picture and verse is to be established. For it is impossible to suppose that all these titles can be flukes. Such a thing might happen once or twice. It might chance that, of the twenty or thirty pieces of poetry which I know, one absolutely fitted this picture of mine, this composition of trees and sky and distance. But it does not so chance. I am quite sure that such a subject as I have chosen has inspired several poets, and that their utterances are somewhere to be found. But where? Johnson Williams could tell me. But I do not know Johnson Williams. Not knowing him, and not having his peculiar familiarity with English verse, I am reluctantly compelled to abandon the idea of a poetic title.
But (while I am on this subject) if Johnson Williams causes me to form a low estimate of my own education, what kind of a figure do I cut beside certain lady and other novelists, who find an apt quotation not merely to head each book that they write, but to serve as keynote to each chapter of each book that they write, and not merely from the limited source of English verse, but from the boundless ocean of a World's Literature. Such a range of knowledge is unbearable
