and exhaust its multitudinous impressions.  Like Sindbad in the valley of precious stones, he wants to fill his pockets with diamonds, but, lo! there is a great ruby like a setting sun in its glory, and a sapphire that, like Bryant’s blue gentian, seems to have dropped from the cerulean walls of heaven, and a nest of pearls that look as if they might be unhatched angel’s eggs, and so he hardly knows what to seize, and tries for too many, and comes out of the enchanted valley with more gems than he can carry, and those that he lets fall by the wayside we call his poems.  You may change the image a thousand ways to show you how hard it is to make a mathematician or a logician out of a poet.  He carries the tropics with him wherever he goes; he is in the true sense felius naturae, and Nature tempts him, as she tempts a child walking through a garden where all the finest fruits are hanging over him and dropping round him, where

     The luscious clusters of the vine
     Upon (his) mouth do crush their wine,
     The nectarine and curious peach,
     Into (his) hands themselves do reach;

and he takes a bite out of the sunny side of this and the other, and, ever stimulated and never satisfied, is hurried through the garden, and, before he knows it, finds himself at an iron gate which opens outward, and leaves the place he knows and loves—­

—­For one he will perhaps soon learn to love and know better,—­said the Master.—–­But I can help you out with another comparison, not quite so poetical as yours.  Why did not you think of a railway-station, where the cars stop five minutes for refreshments?  Is n’t that a picture of the poet’s hungry and hurried feast at the banquet of life?  The traveller flings himself on the bewildering miscellany of delicacies spread before him, the various tempting forms of ambrosia and seducing draughts of nectar, with the same eager hurry and restless ardor that you describe in the poet.  Dear me!  If it wasn’t for All aboard! that summons of the deaf conductor which tears one away from his half-finished sponge-cake and coffee, how I, who do not call myself a poet, but only a questioner, should have enjoyed a good long stop—­say a couple of thousand years—­at this way-station on the great railroad leading to the unknown terminus!

—­You say you are not a poet,—­I said, after a little pause, in which I suppose both of us were thinking where the great railroad would land us after carrying us into the dark tunnel, the farther end of which no man has seen and taken a return train to bring us news about it,—­you say you are not a poet, and yet it seems to me you have some of the elements which go to make one.