enough French to read the Master’s poems. {128} Again, every one here is mirthful and gay, and there is no man with a divinely passionate potentiality of pain.  When I first came here they were always asking me to run with them or jump against them, and one fellow insisted I should box with him, and hurt me very much.  My potentiality of pain is considerable.  Or they would have me drive with them in these dangerous open chariots,—­me, that never rode in a hansom cab without feeling nervous.  And after dinner they sing songs of which I do not catch the meaning of one syllable, and the music is like nothing I ever heard in my life.  And they are all abominably active and healthy.  And such of their poets as I admired—­in Bohn’s cribs, of course—­the poets of the Anthology, are not here at all, and the poets who are here are tremendous proud toffs” (here Figgins relapsed into his natural style as it was before he became a Neopagan poet), “and won’t say a word to a cove.  And I’m sick of the Greeks, and the Fortunate Islands are a blooming fraud, and oh, for paradise, give me Pentonville.”  With these words, perhaps the only unaffected expression of genuine sentiment poor Figgins had ever uttered, he relapsed into a gloomy silence.  I advised him to cultivate the society of the authors whose selected works are in the Greek Delectus, and to try to make friends with Xenophon, whose Greek is about as easy as that of any ancient.  But I fear that Figgins, like the Rev. Peter McSnadden, is really suffering a kind of punishment in the disguise of a reward, and all through having accidentally found his way into what he foolishly thought would be the right paradise for him.

Now I might have stayed long in the Fortunate Islands, yet, beautiful as they were, I ever felt like Odysseus in the island of fair Circe.  The country was lovely and the land desirable, but the Christian souls were not there without whom heaven itself were no paradise to me.  And it chanced that as we sat at the feast a maiden came to me with a pomegranate on a plate of silver, and said, “Sir, thou hast now been here for the course of a whole moon, yet hast neither eaten nor drunk of what is set before thee.  Now it is commanded that thou must taste if it were but a seed of this pomegranate, or depart from among us.”  Then, making such excuses as I might, I was constrained to refuse to eat, for no soul can leave a paradise wherein it has tasted food.  And as I spoke the walls of the fair hall wherein we sat, which were painted with the effigies of them that fell at Thermopylae and in Arcadion, wavered and grew dim, and darkness came upon me.