And a little later, going down the byways of the town, you might have seen the gutters running with hot fresh blood, and have met carts laden with gory hides, and buckets filled with brains and blood, going to the factories and tanyards.  Young lads spent all their days in the slaughter-houses, dealing violent deaths, witnessing tragedies of carnage, hearing incessant plaintive cries, walking about on clogs among pools of clotting or steamy blood, and breathing the fumes of it.  And scarce a mile away from the scene of all these loathsome and degrading sights, sounds, and odors, you might have found fastidious and courtly gentlemen, and ladies all belaced and bejewelled, sentimentalising over their “aspic de foie gras,” or their “cotelettes a la jardiniere,” or some other euphemism for the dead flesh which could not, without pardonable breach of good breeding, be called by its plain true name in their presence.

And when the poet reminded them of this truth, and spoke to them of the demoralisation to which, by their habits, they daily subjected many of their fellowmen; when he drew for them graphic pictures of the slaughteryard, and of all the scenes of suffering and tyranny that led up to it and ensued from it, they clapped their hands to their ears, and cried out that he was a shockingly coarse person, and quite too horribly indelicate for refined society.  Because, indeed, they cared only about a surface and outside refinement, and not a whit for that which is inward and profound.  For beauty of being—­they had neither desire nor power of reverence; all their enthusiasm was spent over forms and words and appearances of beauty.  In them the senses were quickened, but not the heart, nor the reason.  Therefore the spirit of the Reformer was not in them, but the spirit of the Dilettante only.

And the poet was grieved and angry with them, because every true poet is a Reformer; and he went forth and spoke aloud in their public places and rebuked the dwellers in that town.  But except a few curiosity hunters and some idle folks who wanted higher wages and less work, and thought he might help them to get what they wished for, nobody listened to him.  But they went in crowds to see a conjurer, and to hear a man who lectured on blue china, and another who made them a long oration about intricate and obscure texts in a certain old dramatic book.  And I think that in those days, if it had not been for the sweet and gracious song of the fairy bird which he carried about always in his bosom, the poet would have become very heartsick and desponding indeed.  I do not quite know what it was that the bird sang, but it was something about the certainty of the advent of wisdom, and of the coming of the perfect day; and the burden of the song was hope for all the nations of the earth.  Because every beautiful and wise thought that any man conceives is the heritage of the whole race of men, and an earnest and foregleam