There are long seasons when I talk only with the Professor, and others when I give myself wholly up to the Poet.  Now that my winter’s work is over and spring is with us, I feel naturally drawn to the Poet’s company.  I don’t know anybody more alive to life than he is.  The passion of poetry seizes on him every spring, he says,—­yet oftentimes he complains, that, when he feels most, he can sing least.

Then a fit of despondency comes over him.—­I feel ashamed, sometimes,—­said he, the other day,—­to think how far my worst songs fall below my best.  It sometimes seems to me, as I know it does to others who have told me so, that they ought to be all best,—­if not in actual execution, at least in plan and motive.  I am grateful—­he continued—­for all such criticisms.  A man is always pleased to have his most serious efforts praised, and the highest aspect of his nature get the most sunshine.

Yet I am sure, that, in the nature of things, many minds must change their key now and then, on penalty of getting out of tune or losing their voices.  You know, I suppose,—­he said,—­what is meant by complementary colors?  You know the effect, too, which the prolonged impression of any one color has on the retina.  If you close your eyes after looking steadily at a red object, you see a green image.

It is so with many minds,—­I will not say with all.  After looking at one aspect of external nature, or of any form of beauty or truth, when they turn away, the complementary aspect of the same object stamps itself irresistibly and automatically upon the mind.  Shall they give expression to this secondary mental state, or not?

When I contemplate—­said my friend, the Poet—­the infinite largeness of comprehension belonging to the Central Intelligence, how remote the creative conception is from all scholastic and ethical formulae, I am led to think that a healthy mind ought to change its mood from time to time, and come down from its noblest condition,—­never, of course, to degrade itself by dwelling upon what is itself debasing, but to let its lower faculties have a chance to air and exercise themselves.  After the first and second floor have been out in the bright street dressed in all their splendors, shall not our humble friends in the basement have their holiday, and the cotton velvet and the thin-skinned jewelry—­simple adornments, but befitting the station of those who wear them—­show themselves to the crowd, who think them beautiful, as they ought to, though the people up stairs know that they are cheap and perishable?

—­I don’t know that I may not bring the Poet here, some day or other, and let him speak for himself.  Still I think I can tell you what he says quite as well as he could do it.—­Oh,—­he said to me, one day,—­I am but a hand-organ man,—­say rather, a hand-organ.  Life turns the winch, and fancy or accident pulls out the stops.  I come under your windows, some fine