“I am sure I don’t know what you mean, Cyprian, by poetry without rhyme or verse, any more than I should if you talked about pictures that were painted on nothing, or statues that were made out of nothing.  How can you tell that anything is poetry, I should like to know, if there is neither a regular line with just so many syllables, nor a rhyme?  Of course you can’t.  I never have any thoughts too beautiful to put in verse:  nothing can be too beautiful for it.”

Cyprian left the conversation at this point.  It was getting more suggestive than interpenetrating, and he thought he might talk the matter over better with Olive.  Just then a little boy came in, and bargained with Gifted for a Jews-harp, which, having obtained, he placed against his teeth, and began playing upon it with a pleasure almost equal to that of the young poet reciting his own verses.

“A little too much like my friend Gifted Hopkins’s poetry,” Cyprian said, as he left the “store.”  “All in one note, pretty much.  Not a great many tunes, ‘Hi Betty Martin,’ ‘Yankee Doodle,’ and one or two more like them.  But many people seem to like them, and I don’t doubt it is as exciting to Gifted to write them as it is to a great genius to express itself in a poem.”

Cyprian was, perhaps, too exacting.  He loved too well the sweet intricacies of Spenser, the majestic and subtly interwoven harmonies of Milton.  These made him impatient of the simpler strains of Gifted Hopkins.

Though he himself never wrote verses, he had some qualities which his friend the poet may have undervalued in comparison with the talent of modelling the symmetries of verse and adjusting the correspondences of rhyme.  He had kept in a singular degree all the sensibilities of childhood, its simplicity, its reverence.  It seemed as if nothing of all that he met in his daily life was common or unclean to him, for there was no mordant in his nature for what was coarse or vile, and all else he could not help idealizing into its own conception of itself, so to speak.  He loved the leaf after its kind as well as the flower, and the root as well as the leaf, and did not exhaust his capacity of affection or admiration on the blossom or bud upon which his friend the poet lavished the wealth of his verse.  Thus Nature took him into her confidence.  She loves the men of science well, and tells them all her family secrets,—­who is the father of this or that member of the group, who is brother, sister, cousin, and so on, through all the circle of relationship.  But there are others to whom she tells her dreams; not what species or genus her lily belongs to, but what vague thought it has when it dresses in white, or what memory of its birthplace that is which we call its fragrance.  Cyprian was one of these.  Yet he was not a complete nature.  He required another and a wholly different one to be the complement of his own.  Olive came as near it as a sister could, but—­we must