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altogether absurd and out of date when confronted with the facts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!"

"Nothing?" murmured Heliobas, in a tone of suggestive inquiry--
"really nothing?"