“I fear, however,” interrupted Flemming, “that in cities the soul of man grows proud.  He needs at times to be sent forth, like the Assyrian monarch, into green fields, `a wonderous wretch and weedless,’ to eat green herbs, and be wakened and chastised by the rain-shower and winter’s bitter weather.  Moreover, in cities there is danger of the soul’s becoming wed to pleasure, and forgetful of its high vocation.  There have been souls dedicated to heaven from childhood and guarded by good angels as sweet seclusions for holy thoughts, and prayers, and all good purposes; wherein pious wishes dwelt like nuns, and every image was a saint; and yet in life’s vicissitudes, by the treachery of occasion, by the thronging passionsof great cities, have become soiled and sinful.  They resemble those convents on the river Rhine, which have been changed to taverns; from whose chambers the pious inmates have long departed, and in whose cloisters the footsteps of travellers have effaced the images of buried saints, and whose walls are written over with ribaldry and the names of strangers, and resound no more with holy hymns, but with revelry and loud voices.”

“Both town and country have their dangers,” said the Baron; “and therefore, wherever the scholar lives, he must never forget his high vocation.  Other artists give themselves up wholly to the study of their art.  It becomes with them almost religion.  For the most part, and in their youth, at least, they dwell in lands, where the whole atmosphere of the soul is beauty; laden with it as the air may be with vapor, till their very nature is saturated with the genius of their art.  Such, for example, is the artist’s life in Italy.”

“I agree with you,” exclaimed Flemming; “and such should be the Poet’s everywhere; forhe has his Rome, his Florence, his whole glowing Italy within the four walls of his library.  He has in his books the ruins of an antique world,—­and the glories of a modern one,—­his Apollo and Transfiguration.  He must neither forget nor undervalue his vocation; but thank God that he is a poet; and everywhere be true to himself, and to `the vision and the faculty divine’ he feels within him.”

“But, at any rate, a city life is most eventful,” continued the Baron.  “The men who make, or take, the lives of poets and scholars, always complain that these lives are barren of incidents.  Hardly a literary biography begins without some such apology, unwisely made.  I confess, however, that it is not made without some show of truth; if, by incidents, we mean only those startling events, which suddenly turn aside the stream of Time, and change the world’s history in an hour.  There is certainly a uniformity, pleasing or unpleasing, in literary life, which for the most part makes to-day seem twin-born with yesterday.  But if, byincidents, you mean events in the history of the human mind, (and why not?) noiseless events, that do not scar the forehead of the world as battles do, yet change it not the less, then surely the lives of literary men are most eventful.  The complaint and the apology are both foolish.  I do not see why a successful book is not as great an event as a successful campaign; only different in kind, and not easily compared.”