“‘No more’ is a long time, my friend!” interposed Heliobas gently.  “You are too despondent,—­perchance too diffident, concerning your own ability.”

“Ability!” and he laughed wearily.  “I have none,—­I am as weak and inapt as an untaught child—­the music of my heart is silenced!  Yet there is nothing I would not do to regain the ravishment of the past—­when the sight of the sunset across the hills, or the moon’s silver transfiguration of the sea filled me with deep and indescribable ecstasy—­when the thought of Love, like a full chord struck from a magic harp, set my pulses throbbing with delirious delight—­fancies thick as leaves in summer crowded my brain—­Earth was a round charm hung on the breast of a smiling Divinity—­men were gods—­women were angels’—­the world seemed but a wide scroll for the signatures of poets, and mine, I swore, should be clearly written!”

He paused, as though ashamed of his own fervor. and glanced at Heliobas, who, leaning a little forward in his chair was regaling him with friendly, attentive interest; then he continued more calmly: 

“Enough!  I think I had something in me then,—­something that was new and wild and, though it may seem self praise to say so, full of that witching glamour we name Inspiration; but whatever that something was, call it genius, a trick of song, what you will,—­it was soon crushed out of me.  The world is fond of slaying its singing buds and devouring them for daily fare—­one rough pressure of finger and thumb on the little melodious throats, and they are mute forever.  So I found, when at last in mingled pride, hope, and fear I published my poems, seeking for them no other recompense save fair hearing and justice.  They obtained neither—­they were tossed carelessly by a few critics from hand to hand, jeered at for a while, and finally flung back to me as lies—­lies all!  The finely spun web of any fancy,—­the delicate interwoven intricacies of thought,—­these were torn to shreds with as little compunction as idle children feel when destroying for their own cruel sport the velvety wonder of a moth’s wing, or the radiant rose and emerald pinions of a dragon-fly.  I was a fool—­so I was told with many a languid sneer and stale jest—­to talk of hidden mysteries in the whisper of the wind and the dash of the waves—­such sounds were but common cause and effect.  The stars were merely conglomerated masses of heated vapor condensed by the work of ages into meteorites and from meteorites into worlds—­and these went on rolling in their appointed orbits, for what reason nobody knew, but then nobody cared!  And Love—­the key-note of the theme to which I had set my mistaken life in tune—­Love was only a graceful word used to politely define the low but very general sentiment of coarse animal attraction—­in short, poetry such as mine was altogether absurd and out of date when confronted with the facts of every-day existence—­facts which plainly taught us that man’s chief business here below was simply to live, breed, and die—­the life of a silk-worm or caterpillar on a slightly higher platform of ability; beyond this—­nothing!”