"'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!"