"Most assuredly I am no anchorite, Sah-luma!" he said smiling slightly, yet with a touch of sorrow in his voice. "But methinks the consolement thou wouldst offer to enamoured maids is far more dangerous than lasting! Thy love to them means ruin,--thy embraces shame,--thy unthinking passion death! What!--wilt thou be a spendthrift of desire?--wilt thou drain the fond souls of women as a bee drains the sweetness of flowers?--wilt thou, being honey- cloyed, behold them droop and wither around thee, and wilt thou leave them utterly destroyed and desolate? Hast thou no vestige of a heart, my friend? a poet-heart, to feel the misery of the world? ..the patient grief of all-appealing Nature, commingled with the dreadful, yet majestic silence of an unknown God? ... Oh, surely, thou hast this supremest gift of genius, . . this loving, enduring, faithful, sympathetic HEART! ... for without it, how shall thy fame be held long in remembrance? ... how shall thy muse-grown laurels escape decay? Tell me! ..." and leaning forward he caught his friend's hand in his eagerness.. "Thou art not made of stone, . . thou art human, . . thou art not exempt from mortal suffering ..."
"Not exempt--no!" interposed Sah-luma thoughtfully ... "But, as yet,--I have never really suffered!"
"Never really suffered!".. Theos dropped the hand he held, and an invisible barrier seemed to rise slowly up between him and his beautiful companion. Never really suffered! ... then he was no true poet after all, if he was ignorant of sorrow! If he could not spiritually enter into the pathos of speechless griefs and unshed tears,--if he could not absorb into his own being the prayers and plaints of all Creation, and utter them aloud in burning and immortal language, his calling was in vain, his election futile! This thought smote Theos with the strength of a sudden blow,--he sat silent, and weighed with a dreary feeling of disappointment to which he was unable to give any fitting expression.
"I have never really suffered ..." repeated Sah-luma slowly: . . "But--I have IMAGINED suffering! That is enough for me! The passions, the tortures, the despairs of imagination are greater far than the seeming REAL, petty afflictions with which human beings daily perplex themselves; indeed, I have often wondered.. "here his eyes grew more earnest and reflective ..." whether this busy working of the brain called 'Imagination' may not perhaps be a special phase or supreme effort of MEMORY, and that therefore we do not IMAGINE so much as we remember. For instance,--if we have ever lived before, our present recollection may, in certain exalted states of the mind, serve to bring back the shadow- pictures of things long gone by, . . good or evil deeds, . . scenes of love and strife, . . ethereal and divine events, in which we have possibly enacted each our different parts as unwittingly as we enact them here!".. He sighed and seemed somewhat troubled, but presently continued in a lighter tone.. "Yet, after all, it is not necessary for the poet to personally experience the emotions whereof he writes. The divine Hyspiros depicts murderers, cowards, and slaves in his sublime Tragedies,--but thinkest thou it was essential for him to become a murderer, coward, and slave himself in order to delineate these characters? And I ... I write of Love,--love spiritual, love eternal,--love fitted for the angels I have dreamt of--but not for such animals as men,--and what matters it that I know naught of such love, . . unless perchance I knew it years ago in some far-off fairer sphere! ... For me the only charm of worth in woman is beauty! ... Beauty! ... to its entrancing sway my senses all make swift surrender ..."