“‘Then wherefore,’ I interrupted, ’do I see Robert Burns loitering with that lady in a ruff,—­Cassandra, I make no doubt—­Ronsard’s Cassandra?  And why is the incomparable Clarinda inseparable from Petrarch; and Miss Patty Blount, Pope’s flame, from the Syrian Meleager, while his Heliodore is manifestly devoted to Mr. Emerson, whom, by the way, I am delighted, if rather surprised, to see here?’

“‘Ah,’ said Catullus, ’you are a new-comer among us.  Poets will be poets, and no sooner have they attained their desire, and dwelt in the company of their earthly Ideals, than they feel strangely, yet irresistibly drawn to Another.  So it was in life, so it will ever be.  No Ideal can survive a daily companionship, and fortunate is the poet who did not marry his first love!’

“‘As far as that goes,’ I answered, ’most of you were highly favoured; indeed, I do not remember any poet whose Ideal was his wife, or whose first love led him to the altar.’

“‘I was not a marrying man myself,’ answered the Veronese; ’few of us were.  Myself, Horace, Virgil—­we were all bachelors.’

“‘And Lesbia!’

“I said this in a low voice, for Laura was weaving bay into a chaplet, and inattentive to our conversation.

“‘Poor Lesbia!’ said Catullus, with a suppressed sigh.  ’How I misjudged that girl!  How cruel, how causeless were my reproaches,’ and wildly rending his curled locks and laurel crown, he fled into a thicket, whence there soon arose the melancholy notes of the Ausonian lyre.’

“‘He is incorrigible,’ said Laura, very coldly; and she deliberately began to tear and toss away the fragments of the chaplet she had been weaving.  ’I shall never break him of that habit of versifying.  But they are all alike.’

“‘Is there nobody here,’ said I, ’who is happy with his Ideal—­nobody but has exchanged Ideals with some other poet?’

“‘There is one,’ she said.  ’He comes of a northern tribe; and in his life-time he never rhymed upon his unattainable lady, or if rhyme he did, the accents never carried her name to the ears of the vulgar.  Look there.’

“She pointed to the river at our feet, and I knew the mounted figure that was riding the ford, with a green-mantled lady beside him like the Fairy Queen.

“Surely I had read of her, and knew her—­

   “’She whose blue eyes their secret told,
   Though shaded by her locks of gold.’

“‘They are different; I know not why.  They are constant,’ said Laura, and rising with an air of chagrin, she disappeared among the boughs of the trees that bear her name.

“‘Unhappy hearts of poets,’ I mused.  ’Light things and sacred they are, but even in their Paradise, and among their chosen, with every wish fulfilled, and united to their beloved, they cannot be at rest!’

“Thus moralising, I wended my way to a crag, whence there was a wide prospect.  Certain poets were standing there, looking down into an abyss, and to them I joined myself.