sure of love, and David loved to give way. He felt that his friend's
physical beauty implied a real superiority, which he accepted, looking
upon himself as one made of coarser and commoner human clay.

"The ox for patient labor in the fields, the free life for the bird,"
he thought to himself. "I will be the ox, and Lucien shall be the
eagle."

So for three years these friends had mingled the destinies bright with
such glorious promise. Together they read the great works that
appeared above the horizon of literature and science since the Peace
--the poems of Schiller, Goethe, and Byron, the prose writings of
Scott, Jean-Paul, Berzelius, Davy, Cuvier, Lamartine, and many more.
They warmed themselves beside these great hearthfires; they tried
their powers in abortive creations, in work laid aside and taken up
again with new glow of enthusiasm. Incessantly they worked with the
unwearied vitality of youth; comrades in poverty, comrades in the
consuming love of art and science, till they forgot the hard life of
the present, for their minds were wholly bent on laying the
foundations of future fame.

"Lucien," said David, "do you know what I have just received from
Paris?" He drew a tiny volume from his pocket. "Listen!"

And David read, as a poet can read, first Andre de Chenier's Idyll
_Neere_, then _Le Malade_, following on with the Elegy on a Suicide,
another elegy in the classic taste, and the last two _Iambes_.

"So that is Andre de Chenier!" Lucien exclaimed again and again. "It
fills one with despair!" he cried for the third time, when David