_Poet_. You are an ass.

I have summarised an argument which was really prolonged and very
acrimonious. The philosopher prevailed, and the poet, beaten at every
point, forswore what ambitions remained to him, built himself a shepherd's
hut in a valley of the Wiltshire Downs, and planned out his memoirs in
three stout volumes. He believed that he had reached that stage in life
where retrospect is all.

Volume I., _Open Country;_ Volume II., _Halfway House;_ Volume III.,
_Shepherd's Crown_--are titles which indicate the scope and spirit of the
projected work. They were characteristically chosen before a line was
written; nor, indeed, was a single other word put to paper, not so much as
an Advice to the Reader, for two years. The building of his house with his
own hands, and the disposition of the land about it occupied him for the
better part of one; the next, with its progressive seasons of fruition,
was spent in meditative ecstasy; by the beginning of the third his cure
was complete. The poet in him was now the philosopher's humble servant, as
should surely always be the case. Resolved that the world should be
sweetened yet, he attacked his book.

He began with the third volume, in which, under the heading of _Shepherd's
Crown_, he proposed to discharge himself of the conclusions of his ripened
manhood upon the world, as he now saw it from his grassy outlook. Not yet
could he trust himself with _Open Country_. That was for Thoughts. That
was to be filled with spheral music which lay under lock and bolt deep
within his nature. Before he could set that free to throb and beat in his
brain, he must be quite sure that it could not win a way back into his
heart. For she of whom it must consist, whose very name was music, whose
presence, as he said, was like the fluting of a bird, was the renounced,