could never buy--and then they fell to comparing notes of their day's
work. The poet had had one of his rare good days. He had made no money,
his post had been even more disappointing than usual,--but he had
written a poem, the best he had ever written, he said, as he always said
of his last new thing. He had been burning to read it to somebody all
afternoon--had with difficulty refrained from reading it to the
loquacious little keeper's wife as she brought him some coals--so it was
not to be expected that he should wait a minute before reading it to her
whom indeed it strove to celebrate. With arms round each other's necks,
they bent over the table littered with the new-born poem, all blots and
dashes like the first draft of a composer's score, and the poet, deftly
picking his way among the erasures and interlineations, read aloud the
beautiful words--with a full sense of their beauty!--to ears that deemed
them more beautiful even than they were. The owners of this now valuable
copyright allow me to irradiate my prose with three of the verses.

'Ah! what,' half-chanted, half-crooned the poet--

'Ah! what a garden is your hair!--
Such treasure as the kings of old,
In coffers of the beaten gold,
Laid up on earth--and left it there.'

So tender a reference to hair whose beauty others beside the poet had
loved must needs make a tender interruption--the only kind of
interruption the poet could have forgiven--and 'Who,' he continued--

'Who was the artist of your mouth?
What master out of old Japan
Wrought it so dangerous to man ...'