And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?"

My God! Who wrote it? Who could have? Not any of the big fellows he knew about … this was another note: he knew it instinctively. And the man's name? Marlowe … and he'd lived, why, ever so long ago, two or three hundred years before this old house of Miss Lorburn's was built, or the funny old mouldy Half Hours book published—and the English language, in this Marlowe's hands, was already a flower and a flame… . Vance rambled on from glory to glory, slowly, amazedly, and then, out of sheer gluttony, pushed the book under his chair, like a dog hiding a bone, and wandered back to the magic shelves for more.

"When she moves, you see

Like water from a crystal overflowed,

Fresh beauty tremble out of her, and lave

Her fair sides to the ground … "

Vance dropped the little volume, and pressing his hands against his eyes let the frail music filter through him. This poetry had another quality of newness quite its own—something elusive as the shy beauty of a cold spring evening. Beddoes … that was the name. Another unknown! Was he a contemporary of those others, Marlowe and Ford, who lived so long before the Willows was built, almost before the Hudson River had a name? Or was he not, rather with an exquisite new note, trying to lure back the earlier music? How could a boy from Euphoria hope to find his way through this boundless forest of English poetry, called hither and thither by all these wild-winged birds pouring down their music on him?

As he stood groping and gazing, in the litter and confusion of the ravaged shelves, his eyes fell on a title which seemed to hold out help. Half Hours with the Best Authors—stoutish volumes in worn black cloth, with queer pinnacled gilt lettering. Well, at least they would tell him who were supposed to be the best authors when the book was written—put him wise on that, anyhow. He reached for a volume, and settled himself down again.

The book was not, as Vance had expected, a series of "half hour" essays on the best authors. Charles Knight (that was the man's name) had simply ranged through a library like Miss Lorburn's, about eighty years ago, gathered this bloom and that, and bound them together with the fewest words. Vance, accustomed to short-cuts to culture, had expected an early version of the "five-foot shelf"; he found, instead, the leisurely selections of an anthologist to whom it had obviously not occurred that he might have readers too hurried to dwell on the more recondite beauties of English literature. The choice of the poetry did not greatly interest Vance, after Lamb's Specimens and the Beddoes volume; but as his eye travelled on he found himself receiving for the first time—except when he had first read his Bible as literature—the mighty shock of English prose.