LECTOR.  I am glad to be reminded, Scriptor, that you are a poet, for the line of your argument had almost made me forget it.  One expects other views from a poet.

SCRIPTOR.  When, my dear Lector, shall we get rid of the silly idea that the poet should give us only the ornamental view of life, and rock us to sleep, like babies, with pretty lullabies?  Is it not possible to make facts sing as well as fancies?  With all this beautiful world to sing of—­for beautiful it is, however it be marred; with this wonderful life—­and wonderful and sweet it is though it is shot through with such bitter pain; with such certainties for his theme, we yet beg him to sing to us of shadows!

And you talk of ‘faith.’  ‘Faith’ truly is what we want, but it is faith in the life here, not in the life hereafter.  Faith in the life here!  Let our poets sing us that.  And such as would deny it—­I would hang them as enemies of society.

LECTOR.  But, at all events, to keep to our point—­you at least hope for immortality.  If Edison, say, were suddenly to discover it for us as a scientific certainty, you would welcome the news?

SCRIPTOR.  Well, yes and no!  Have you seen the ‘penny’ phonographs in the Strand?  You should go and have a pennyworth of the mysteries of time and space!  How long will Edison’s latest magic toy survive this popularisation, I wonder?  For a little moment it awakens the sense of wonder in the idly curious, who set the demon tube to their ears; but if they make any remarks at all, it is of the cleverness of Mr. Edison, the probable profits of the invention—­and not a word of the wonder of the world!  So it would be with the undiscovered country.  I was blamed the other day as being cheaply smart because I said that if ’one traveller returned,’ his resurrection would soon be as commonplace as the telephone, and that enterprising firms would be interviewing him as to the prospects of opening branch establishments in Hades.  Yet it is a perfectly serious, and, I think, true remark; for who that knows the modern man, with his small knowingness, and his utter incapacity for reverence, would doubt that were Mr. Edison actually to be the Columbus of the Unseen, it would soon be as overrun with gaping tourists as Switzerland, and that within a year railway companies would be advertising ‘Bank-holidays in Eternity’?

No! let us keep the Unseen—­or, if it must be discovered, let the key thereof be given only to true-lovers and poets.

A SEAPORT IN THE MOON

No one is so hopelessly wrong about the stars as the astronomer, and I trust that you never pay any attention to his remarks on the moon.  He knows as much about the moon as a coiffeur knows of the dreams of the fair lady whose beautiful neck he makes still more beautiful.  There is but one opinion upon the moon—­namely, our own.  And if you think that science is thus wronged, reflect a moment