"I scorn your land, So far it lies below me; here I see
How all the sacred stars do circle me."
Henry Vaughan.
 
THERE survives in certain men a climbing instinct, a , dating from Babel days, which keeps them to the belief that they were meant to be, in Spenser's phrase, "neighbors to the sky." Put them down in a city, and they mount, by choice, as by force of circumstances, oil-like, over the gross mass. These are the garret-, disburdened, for the most part, of the money-bags of capitalists. Surely, the more a creature is of riches and responsibilities, the his spiritual weight, the fitter he is for nearing the unembarrassed planets. He is no underling. His poverty raises him up. He marches, like a towards some fine, city, into the high places; his castle is over against the morning; and his bare forehead is reared above the crowns of Europe.
 
That the rich should be the groundlings, after all, is one of the diverting and counter-turns of society. Who would not, rather, stand play-fellow to the sun, and consider the moon's light nothing less familiar than a beneficent household elf, and suffer the companionship of the rainbow and of snows? Distant and faint sounds the thunder of the streets; Teufelsdröckh, and such as he, "sit above it, alone with the stars." darkness cannot overtake the of the garret. His matins are over and done while candles still below. The of the Banshee reaches not his far-removed ear. No flood in highways him; the tramp of armies, likewise, is beneath him, and he overlooks revolutions, undisturbed. For him, perpetually, are ultra-mundane joys, the choragium of the spheres, and the revelations of the shifting air.
 
 
The conjurer and the alike love the "high lonely tower." The painter goes for light, the student for contemplation. There, according to international traditions, is the Poor Author to be found,—
 
" by soft thro' the broken ."
 
The Poor Author! The saving of literature! Here is his native heather, and not elsewhere. Here his must be taken. If ghosts revisit their whilom kingdoms, here Otway, Addison, Dryden, Chatterton, , Béranger, flock some time or other. Here you shall brush against the shade of Marvell, who dwelt thus high and thus , when the king's deputies came with unavailing gifts in their hands, to buy his favor; and presently dear Oliver Goldsmith shall turn his face upon you, and tell you, in his voice, as he once it out before the elegant circles at Sir Joshua's, how he lived happily among the beggars in ^............