forces, qualities, in some sort of corporal shape, with each a propensity
or impulse of its own, but it does not seem to me so natural that the
derivative peoples should cease to do so. It is rational that they should
do so, and I don't know that any stronger proof of our intellectual
advance could be alleged than the fact that the old personifications
survive in the parlance while they are quite extinct in the
consciousness. We still talk of death at times as if it were an embodied
force of some kind, and of love in the same way; but I don't believe that
any man of the commonest common-school education thinks of them so. If
you try to do it yourself, you are rather ashamed of the puerility, and
when a painter or a sculptor puts them in an objective shape, you follow
him with impatience, almost with contempt."

"How about the poets?" asked Minver, less with the notion, perhaps, of
refuting the psychologist than of bringing the literary member of our
little group under the disgrace that had fallen upon him as an artist.

"The poets," said I, "are as extinct as the personifications."

"That's very handsome of you, Acton," said the artist. "But go on,
Wanhope."

"Yes, get down to business," said Rulledge. Being of no employ whatever,
and spending his whole life at the club in an extraordinary idleness,
Rulledge was always using the most strenuous expressions, and requiring
everybody to be practical. He leaned directly forward with the difficulty
that a man of his girth has in such a movement, and vigorously broke off
the ash of his cigar against the edge of his saucer. We had been dining
together, and had been served with coffee in the Turkish room, as it was
called from its cushions and hangings of Indian and Egyptian stuffs.