enduring metal--is all that remains.

If it were possible for the spring of appetite and quest to be dried up
in man, such a spectacle would dry up that spring.

It is not possible, for it is providentially in the nature of man to
cherish these illusions of an immortal memory and of a life bestowed
upon the shade or the mere name of his living greatness. Those various
forms of fame which are young men's goals, and to which the eager
creative power of early manhood so properly directs itself, seem each in
turn or each for its varying temperament to promise the desired reward;
and one imagines that his love, another that his discoveries, another
that his victories in the field or his conspicuous acts of courage will
remain permanently with his fellows long after he has left their feast.

As though to give some substance to the flattering cheat, there is one
kind of fame which men have been permitted to attain, and which does
give them a sort of fixed tenure--if not for ever, yet for generations
upon generations--in the human city. This sort of fame is the fame of
the great poets. There is nothing more enduring. It has for some who
were most blessed outlasted, you may say, all material things which they
handled or they knew--all fabrics, all instruments, all habitations. It
is comparable in its endurance to the years, and a man reads the "Song
of Roland" and can still look on that same unchanged Cleft of
Roncesvalles, or a man reads the Iliad and can look to-day westward from
the shores to Tenedos. But wait a moment. Are they indeed blessed in
this, the great poets? Ronsard debated it. He decided that they were,
and put into the mouth of the muses the great lines:----

Mais un tel accident n'arrive point a l'ame,