“No; it is weak and exaggerated.”

“Ah! you don’t understand it.  I didn’t until after my father died.  Then I began to know what it meant, and now think it the most beautiful poem I ever read.”

“You are fond of poetry, then?”

“I don’t read much; but I think there is more in some poetry than in all the prose in the world.”

“That is a good deal to say.”

“A good deal too much, when I think that I haven’t read, I suppose, twenty books in my life—­that is, books worth calling books:  I don’t mean novels and things of that kind.  Yet I can not believe twenty years of good reading would make me change my mind about In Memoriam.—­You don’t like poetry?”

“I can’t say I do—­much.  I like Pope and Crabbe—­and—­let me see—­well, I used to like Thomson.  I like the men that give you things just as they are.  I do not like the poets that mix themselves up with what they see, and then rave about Nature.  I confess myself a lover of the truth beyond all things.”

“But are you sure,” she returned, looking him gently but straight in the eyes, “that, in your anxiety not to make more of things than they are, you do not make less of them than they are?”

“There is no fear of that,” returned Faber sadly, with an unconscious shake of the head.  “So long as there is youth and imagination on that side to paint them,—­”

“Excuse me:  are you not begging the question?  Do they paint, or do they see what they say?  Some profess to believe that the child sees more truly than the grown man—­that the latter is the one who paints,—­paints out, that is, with a coarse brush.”

“You mean Wordsworth.”

“Not him only.”

“True; no end of poets besides.  They all say it now-a-days.”

“But surely, Mr. Faber, if there be a God,—­”

“Ah!” interrupted the doctor, “there, you beg the question.  Suppose there should be no God, what then?”

“Then, I grant you, there could be no poetry.  Somebody says poetry is the speech of hope; and certainly if there were no God, there could be no hope.”

Faber was struck with what she said, not from any feeling that there was truth in it, but from its indication of a not illogical mind.  He was on the point of replying that certain kinds of poetry, and In Memoriam in particular, seemed to him more like the speech of a despair that had not the courage to confess itself and die; but he saw she had not a suspicion he spoke as he did for any thing but argument, and feared to fray his bird by scattering his crumbs too roughly.  He honestly believed deliverance from the superstition into which he granted a fine nature was readier to fall than a common one, the greatest gift one human being could offer to another; but at the same time he could not bear to think of her recoil from such utterance of his unfaith as he had now almost got into the habit of making.  He bethought himself,