ear, as if whispered by some mocking spirit. He argued that he had often
found himself too fastidious. His demand for finish ruined many of his
verses, rubbing and melting and wearing them away, like frost and wind
and rain, till they were worthless! The predominance and overkeenness of
the critical had turned in him to disease! His eye was sharpened to see
the point of a needle, but a tree only as a blotted mass! A man's mind
was meant to receive as a mirror, not to concentrate rays like a convex
lens! Was it not then likely that the first reading gave the true
impression of the ethereal, the vital, the flowing, the iridescent? Did
not the solitary and silent night brood like a hen on the nest of the
poet's imaginings? Was it not the night that waked the soul? Did not the
commonplace vanish along with the "garish" day? How then could its light
afford the mood fit for judging a poem--the cold sick morning, when life
is but half worth living! Walter did not think how much champagne he had
taken, nor how much that might have to do with one judgment at night and
another in the morning. "Set one mood against another," he said,
conscious all the time it was a piece of special pleading, "and the one
weighs as much as the other!" For it was horrible to him to think that
the morning was the clear-eyed, and that the praise he had lavished on
the book was but a vapor of the night. How was he to carry himself to
the lady of his love, who at most did not care half as much for him as
for her book?

How poetry could be such a passion with her when her own was but
mediocre, was a question Walter dared not shape--not, however, that he
saw the same question might be put with regard to himself: his own
poetry was neither strong nor fresh nor revealing. He had not noted that
an unpoetic person will occasionally go into a mild ecstasy over phrase
or passage or verse in which a poet may see little or nothing.