Here there were loud cries for the hostess, and she hurried away. The farmers and drovers were beginning to depart, and their bills were to be made out and paid. Leonard saw his hostess no more that night. The last hip-hip-hurrah, was heard; some toast, perhaps, to the health of the county members;--and the chamber of woe, beside Leonard's, rattled with the shout. By-and-by silence gradually succeeded the various dissonant sounds below. The carts and gigs rolled away; the clatter of hoofs on the road ceased; there was then a dumb dull sound as of locking-up, and low humming voices below and footsteps mounting the stairs to bed, with now and then a drunken hiccup or maudlin laugh, as some conquered votary of Bacchus was fairly carried up to his domicile.
All, then, at last was silent, just as the clock from the church sounded the stroke of eleven.
Leonard, meanwhile, had been looking over his MSS. There was first a project for an improvement on the steam-engine--a project that had long lain in his mind, begun with the first knowledge of mechanics that he had gleaned from his purchases of the Tinker. He put that aside now--it required too great an effort of the reasoning faculty to re-examine. He glanced less hastily over a collection of essays on various subjects, some that he thought indifferent, some that he thought good. He then lingered over a collection of verses, written in his best hand with loving care--verses first inspired by his perusal of Nora's melancholy memorials. These verses were as a diary of his heart and his fancy--those deep unwitnessed struggles which the boyhood of all more thoughtful natures has passed in its bright yet murky storm of the cloud and the lightning flash; though but few boys pause to record the crisis from which slowly emerges Man. And these first, desultory grapplings with the fugitive airy images that flit through the dim chambers of the brain, had become with each effort more sustained and vigorous, till the phantoms were spelled, the flying ones arrested, the immaterial seized, and clothed with Form. Gazing on his last effort, Leonard felt that there at length spoke forth a Poet. It was a work which, though as yet but half completed, came from a strong hand; not that shadow trembling on unsteady waters, which is but the pale reflex and imitation of some bright mind, sphered out of reach and afar; but an original substance--a life--a thing of the _Creative_ Faculty--breathing back already the breath it had received. This work had paused during Leonard's residence with Mr. Avenel, or had only now and then, in stealth, and at night, received a rare touch. Now, as with a fresh eye, he re-perused it; and with that strange, innocent admiration, not of self--(for a man's work is not, alas! himself--it is the beatified and idealized essence, extracted he knows not how from his own human elements of clay)--admiration known but to poets--their purest delight, often their sole reward. And then, with a warmer and more earthly beat of his full heart, he rushed in fancy to the Great City, where all rivers of Fame meet, but not to be merged and lost--sallying forth again, individualized and separate, to flow through that one vast thought of God which we call THE WORLD.