“Oh, the brute!” chuckled the wizen youth, “without prostitutes and public-houses! what a world to live in!”

“The optimist counsels manual labour for all.  The pessimist believes that forgetfulness and nothingness is the whole of man.  He says, ’I defy the wisest of you to tell me why I am here, and being here, what good is gained by my assisting to bring others here.’  The pessimist is therefore the gay Johnny, and the optimist is the melancholy Johnny.  The former drinks champagne and takes his ‘tart’ out to dinner, the latter says that life is not intended to be happy in—­that there is plenty of time to rest when you are dead.”

John laughed loudly; but a moment after, reassuming his look of admonition, he asked Mike to tell him about his poem.

“The subject is astonishingly beautiful,” said Mike; “I only speak of the subject; no one, not even Victor Hugo or Shelley, ever conceived a finer theme.  But they had execution, I have only the idea.  I suppose the world to have ended; but ended, how?  Man has at last recognized that life is, in equal parts, misery and abomination, and has resolved that it shall cease.  The tide of passion has again risen, and lashed by repression to tenfold fury, the shores of life have again been strewn with new victims; but knowledge—­calm, will-less knowledge—­has gradually invaded all hearts; and the restless, shifting sea (which is passion) shrinks to its furthest limits.

“There have been Messiahs, there have been persecutions, but the Word has been preached unintermittently.  Crowds have gathered to listen to the wild-eyed prophets.  You see them on the desert promontories, preaching that human life must cease; they call it a disgraceful episode in the life of one of the meanest of the planets—­you see them hunted and tortured as were their ancestors, the Christians of the reign of Diocletian.  You see them entering cottage doors and making converts in humble homes.  The world, grown tired of vain misery, accepts oblivion.

“The rage and the seething of the sea is the image I select to represent the struggle for life.  The dawn is my image for the diffusion and triumph of sufficient reason.  In a couple of hundred lines I have set my scene, and I begin.  It is in the plains of Normandy; of countless millions only two friends remain.  One of them is dying.  As the stars recede he stretches his hand to his companion, breathes once more, looking him in the face, joyous in the attainment of final rest.  A hole is scraped, and the last burial is achieved.  Then the man, a young beautiful man with the pallor of long vigils and spiritual combat upon his face, arises.

“The scene echoes strangely the asceticism that produced it.  Rose-garden and vineyard are gone; there are no fields, nor hedgerows, nor gables seen picturesquely on a sky, human with smoke mildly ascending.  A broken wall that a great elm tears and rends, startles the silence; apple-orchards spread no flowery snow, and the familiar thrushes have deserted the moss-grown trees, in other times their trees; and the virgin forest ceases only to make bleak place for marish plains with lonely pools and stagnating streams, where perchance a heron rises on blue and heavy wings.