myself as I sit here now but by reflection from that which then I shall be.
Drummond of Hawthornden helped you at that stile.
—Yes, Mr Best said youngly, I feel Hamlet quite young. The bitterness might be from the father but the passages with Ophelia are surely from the son.
Has the wrong sow by the lug. He is in my father. I am in his son.
—That mole is the last to go, Stephen said, laughing.
John Eglinton made a nothing pleasing mow.
—If that were the birthmark of genius, he said, genius would be a drug in the market. The plays of Shakespeare’s later years which Renan admired so much breathe another spirit.
—The spirit of reconciliation, the quaker librarian breathed.
—There can be no reconciliation, Stephen said, if there has not been a sundering.
Said that.
—If you want to know what are the events which casttheir shadow over the hell of time of King Lear, Othello, Hamlet, Troilus and Cressida, look to see when and how the shadow lifts. What softens the heart of a man, shipwrecked in storms dire, Tried, like another Ulysses, Pericles, prince of Tyre?
Head, redconecapped, buffeted, brineblinded.
—A child, a girl placed in his arms. Marina.
—The leaning of sophists towards the bypaths of apocrypha is a constant quantity, John Eglinton detected. The highroads are dreary but they lead to the town.
Good Bacon: gone musty. Shakespeare Bacon’s wild oats. Cypherjugglers going the highroads. Seekers on the great quest. What town, good masters? Mummed in names: A. E, eon: Magee, John Eglinton. East of the sun, west of the moon: Tir na n-og. Booted the twain and staved.
How many miles to Dublin?
Three score and ten, sir.
Will we be there by candlelight?
—Mr Brandes accepts it, Stephen said, as the first play of the closing period.
—Does he? What does Mr Sidney Lee, or Mr Simon Lazarus, as some aver his name is, say of it?
—Marina, Stephen said, a child of storm, Miranda, a wonder, Perdita, that which was lost. What was lost is given back to him: his daughter’s child.
