This hope was not fulfilled. I had not supposed
it would be. What did surprise me, when anon the sea rolled close up
to the cottage, was the comportment of the young artist himself. His
sobriety gave place to an intense animation. He leapt, he waved his
spade, he invited the waves with wild gestures and gleeful cries. His
face had flushed bright, and now, as the garden walls crumbled, and
the paths and lawns were mingled by the waters' influence and
confluence, and the walls of the cottage itself began to totter, and
the gables sank, and all, all was swallowed, his leaps were so high in
air that they recalled to my memory those of a strange religious sect
which once visited London; and the glare of his eyes was less
indicative of a dreamer than of a triumphant fiend.
I myself was conscious of a certain wild enthusiasm within me. But
this was less surprising for that I had not built the cottage, and my
fancy had not enabled me to dwell in it. It was the boy's own
enthusiasm that made me feel, as never before, how deep-rooted in the
human breast the love of destruction, of mere destruction, is. And I
began to ask myself: `Even if England as we know it, the English
polity of which that cottage was a symbol to me, were the work of
(say) Mr. Robert Smillie's own unaided hands'--but I waived the
question coming from that hypothesis, and other questions that would
have followed; for I wished to be happy while I might.
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