"Control the fashion of your speech, I pray you, sir!" he said,
with excessive haughtiness--"The noble Laureate is my friend and
host,--I suffer no man to use his name unworthily in my presence!"

The sage drew back, and spread out his hands in a pacifying
manner.

'Oh, I crave your pardon, good stranger!"--he murmured, with a
kind of apologetic satire in his acrid voice,--"I crave it most
abjectly! Yet to somewhat excuse the hastiness of my words, I
would explain that a contempt for poets and poetry is now
universal among persons of profound enlightenment and practical
knowledge..."

"I am aware of it!" interrupted Theos swiftly and with passion--"I
am aware that so-called 'wise' men, rooted in narrow prejudice,
with a smattering of even narrower logic, presume, out of their
immeasurable littleness, to decry and make mock of the truly
great, who, thanks to God's unpurchasable gift of inspiration, can
do without the study of books or the teaching of pedants,--who
flare through the world flame-winged and full of song, like angels
passing heavenward,--and whose voices, rich with music, not only
sanctify the by-gone ages, but penetrate with echoing, undying
sweetness the ages still to come! Contempt for poets!--Aye, 'tis
common!--the petty, boastful pedagogues of surface learning ever
look askance on these kings in exile, these emperors masked, these
gods disguised! ... but humiliated, condemned, or rejected, they
are still the supreme rulers of the human heart,--and a Love-Ode
chanted in the Long-Ago by one such fire-lipped minstrel outlasts
the history of many kingdoms!"