—­I don’t think you mean to flatter me,—­the Master answered,—­and, what is more, for I am not afraid to be honest with you, I don’t think you do flatter me.  I have taken the inventory of my faculties as calmly as if I were an appraiser.  I have some of the qualities, perhaps I may say many of the qualities, that make a man a poet, and yet I am not one.  And in the course of a pretty wide experience of men—­and women—­(the Master sighed, I thought, but perhaps I was mistaken)—­I have met a good many poets who were not rhymesters and a good many rhymesters who were not poets.  So I am only one of the Voiceless, that I remember one of you singers had some verses about.  I think there is a little music in me, but it has not found a voice, and it never will.  If I should confess the truth, there is no mere earthly immortality that I envy so much as the poet’s.  If your name is to live at all, it is so much more to have it live in people’s hearts than only in their brains!  I don’t know that one’s eyes fill with tears when he thinks of the famous inventor of logarithms, but song of Burns’s or a hymn of Charles Wesley’s goes straight to your heart, and you can’t help loving both of them, the sinner as well as the saint.  The works of other men live, but their personality dies out of their labors; the poet, who reproduces himself in his creation, as no other artist does or can, goes down to posterity with all his personality blended with whatever is imperishable in his song.  We see nothing of the bees that built the honeycomb and stored it with its sweets, but we can trace the veining in the wings of insects that flitted through the forests which are now coal-beds, kept unchanging in the amber that holds them; and so the passion of Sappho, the tenderness of Simonides, the purity of holy George Herbert, the lofty contemplativeness of James Shirley, are before us to-day as if they were living, in a few tears of amber verse.  It seems, when one reads,

     “Sweet day! so cool, so calm, so bright,”

or,

     “The glories of our birth and state,”

as if it were not a very difficult matter to gain immortality,—­such an immortality at least as a perishable language can give.  A single lyric is enough, if one can only find in his soul and finish in his intellect one of those jewels fit to sparkle “on the stretched forefinger of all time.”  A coin, a ring, a string of verses.  These last, and hardly anything else does.  Every century is an overloaded ship that must sink at last with most of its cargo.  The small portion of its crew that get on board the new vessel which takes them off don’t pretend to save a great many of the bulky articles.  But they must not and will not leave behind the hereditary jewels of the race; and if you have found and cut a diamond, were it only a spark with a single polished facet, it will stand a better chance of being saved from the wreck than anything, no matter what, that wants much room for stowage.