A Hundred Years Ago by Alice Meynell

An old book called _The Mirror of the Months_, published anonymously in 1826, seemed, at a glance, to a random reader, to contain little thin springs of thoughts that walked the world in volume and dignity fifty years later. There was nothing else to hint that the book was the work of the father of a poet, but the father of one among all poets was manifestly the author. Soon after, the same reader found it attributed, in a bookseller's catalogue, to P. G. Patmore.

The earliest or the directest spring is called the source of a river; but we know not how far apart and on what scattered watersheds rose the tributary waters, early and late, that filled a splendid summoning and gathering stream, and charged it with rains of the four courts of heaven. It need not dismay us to find the one discoverable source to be something so slight as-for example-a passage on the month of February in _The Mirror of the Months_ (it is hardly worth quoting) whereof the ode on ‘St. Valentine's Day' of Coventry Patmore was the ultimate fulfilment. Yet a reader may be reluctant to find a small thought, lying cold in a minor mind, to be the certain beginning of a great thought in an illustrious mind; the perfectly recognizable yet insignificant origin of what we love is more surprising than would be a stranger beginning. Perhaps we feel this unwelcome surprise because we had been too ready to believe that what is original is strong, and what is original is warm. It was easier to think of a first impulse tiring or becoming more composed, of a passion gradually losing light and flame, than of this increase, kindling, and quickening. It is because the small source of ‘St. Valentine's Day' is really authentic that its inadequacy does little less than startle us. At any rate the incident is one that may instruct us in the history of that second step which is momentous in intellectual things.