He read much in the poets; you would say that
Vergil and Ovid, as well as the poets of his own day, were his friends;
he lived within, surrounded by his own images, and therefore he loved
and hated with ten times the ardour of a common man. He was furious for
the Old Faith, furious against the new; he dreamed of wars and gallantry
and splendour; you could see it even in his dress, in his furred
doublet, the embroideries at his throat, his silver-hilted rapier, as
well as in his port and countenance: and the burning heart of all his
images, the mirror on earth of Mary in heaven, the emblem of his piety,
the mistress of his dreams--she who embodied for him what the courtiers
in London protested that Elizabeth embodied for them--the pearl of great
price, the one among ten thousand--this, for him, was Mary Stuart, Queen
of Scotland, now prisoner in her cousin's hands, going to and fro from
house to house, with a guard about her, yet with all the seeming of
liberty and none of its reality....
The rough bitterness died out of the boy's face, and a look came upon it
as of one who sees a vision.
"Queen Mary?" he said, as if he pronounced the name of the Mother of
God. "Yes; I have heard of her.... She is in Norfolk, I think."
Then he let flow out of him the stream that always ran in his heart like
sorrowful music ever since the day when first, as a page, in my Lord
Shrewsbury's house in Sheffield, he had set eyes on that queen of
sorrows.
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