The poet sat down on the bench beside him, and he and Ernest talked together.  Often had the poet held intercourse with the wittiest and the wisest, but never before with a man like Ernest, whose thoughts and feelings gushed up with such a natural feeling, and who made great truths so familiar by his simple utterance of them.  Angels, as had been so often said, seemed to have wrought with him at his labor in the fields; angels seemed to have sat with him by the fireside; and, dwelling with angels as friend with friends, he had imbibed the sublimity of their ideas, and imbued it with the sweet and lowly charm of household words.  So thought the poet.  And Ernest, on the other hand, was moved and agitated by the living images which the poet flung out of his mind, and which peopled all the air about the cottage-door with shapes of beauty, both gay and pensive.  The sympathies of these two men instructed them with a profounder sense than either could have attained alone.  Their minds accorded into one strain, and made delightful music which neither of them could have claimed as all his own, nor distinguished his own share from the other’s.  They led one another, as it were, into a high pavilion of their thoughts, so remote, and hitherto so dim, that they had never entered it before, and so beautiful that they desired to be there always.

As Ernest listened to the poet, he imagined that the Great Stone Face was bending forward to listen too.  He gazed earnestly into the poet’s glowing eyes.

‘Who are you, my strangely gifted guest?’ he said.

The poet laid his finger on the volume that Ernest had been reading.

‘You have read these poems,’ said he.  ’You know me, then—­for I wrote them.’

Again, and still more earnestly than before, Ernest examined the poet’s features; then turned towards the Great Stone Face; then back, with an uncertain aspect, to his guest.  But his countenance fell; he shook his head, and sighed.

‘Wherefore are you sad?’ inquired the poet.  ‘Because,’ replied Ernest, ’all through life I have awaited the fulfilment of a prophecy; and, when I read these poems, I hoped that it might be fulfilled in you.’

‘You hoped,’ answered the poet, faintly smiling, ’to find in me the likeness of the Great Stone Face.  And you are disappointed, as formerly with Mr. Gathergold, and old Blood-and-Thunder, and Old Stony Phiz.  Yes, Ernest, it is my doom.

You must add my name to the illustrious three, and record another failure of your hopes.  For—­in shame and sadness do I speak it, Ernest—­I am not worthy to be typified by yonder benign and majestic image.’

‘And why?’ asked Ernest.  He pointed to the volume.  ’Are not those thoughts divine?’

‘They have a strain of the Divinity,’ replied the poet.  ’You can hear in them the far-off echo of a heavenly song.  But my life, dear Ernest, has not corresponded with my thought.  I have had grand dreams, but they have been only dreams, because I have lived—­and that, too, by my own choice among poor and mean realities.  Sometimes, even—­shall I dare to say it?—–­I lack faith in the grandeur, the beauty, and the goodness, which my own works are said to have made more evident in nature and in human life.  Why, then, pure seeker of the good and true, shouldst thou hope to find me, in yonder image of the divine?’