Eastern love-legend, fantastically beautiful as many such legends
are, full of grace and passionate fervor--a theme fitted for the
nightingale-utterance of a singer like the Persian Hafiz--though
even Hafiz would have found it difficult to match the exquisitely
choice language and delicately ringing rhythm in which this quaint
idyll of long past ages was now most perfectly set like a jewel in
fine gold. Alwyn himself entirely realized the splendid literary
value of the composition--he knew that nothing more artistic in
conception or more finished in treatment had appeared since the
St. Agnes Eve of Keats--and as he thought of this, he yielded to a
growing sense of self-complacent satisfaction which gradually
destroyed all the deeply devout humility he had at first felt
concerning the high and mysterious origin of his inspiration. The
old inherent pride of his nature reasserted itself--he reviewed
all the circumstances of his "trance" in the most practical
manner--and calling to mind how the poet Coleridge had improvised
the delicious fragment of Kubla Khan in a dream, he began to see
nothing so very remarkable in his own unconscious production of a
complete poem while under mesmeric or magnetic influences.

"After all," he mused, "the matter is simple enough when one
reasons it out. I have been unable to write anything worth writing
for a long time, and I told Heliobas as much. He, knowing my
apathetic condition of brain, employed his force accordingly,
though he denies having done so, ... and this poem is evidently
the result of my long pent-up thoughts that struggled for
utterance yet could not before find vent in words. The only
mysterious part of the affair is this 'Field of Ardath,' ... how
its name haunts me! ... and how HER face shines before the eyes of
my memory! That SHE should be a phantom of my own creation seems