nd us
after carrying us into the dark tunnel, the farther end of which no man
has seen and taken a return train to bring us news about it,--you say you
are not a poet, and yet it seems to me you have some of the elements
which go to make one.

--I don't think you mean to flatter me,--the Master answered,--and, what
is more, for I am not afraid to be honest with you, I don't think you do
flatter me. I have taken the inventory of my faculties as calmly as if I
were an appraiser. I have some of the qualities, perhaps I may say many
of the qualities, that make a man a poet, and yet I am not one. And in
the course of a pretty wide experience of men--and women--(the Master
sighed, I thought, but perhaps I was mistaken)--I have met a good many
poets who were not rhymesters and a good many rhymesters who were not
poets. So I am only one of the Voiceless, that I remember one of you
singers had some verses about. I think there is a little music in me, but
it has not found a voice, and it never will. If I should confess the
truth, there is no mere earthly immortality that I envy so much as the
poet's. If your name is to live at all, it is so much more to have it
live in people's hearts than only in their brains! I don't know that
one's eyes fill with tears when he thinks of the famous inventor of
logarithms, but song of Burns's or a hymn of Charles Wesley's goes
straight to your heart, and you can't help loving both of them, the
sinner as well as the saint. The works of other men live, but their
personality dies out of their labors; the poet, who reproduces himself in
his creation, as no other artist does or can, goes down to posterity with
all his personality blended with whatever is imperishable in his song.
We see nothing of the bees that built the honeycomb and stored it with
its sweets, but we can trace the veining in the wings of insects that
flitted through the forests which are now coal-beds, kept unchanging in
the amber that holds them; and so the passion of Sappho, the tenderness
of Simonides, the purity of holy George Herbert, the lofty
contemplativeness of James Shirley, are before us to-day as if they were
living, in a few tears of amber verse. It seems, when one reads,

"Sweet day! so cool, so calm, so bright,"

or,

"The glories of our birth and state,"

as if it were not a very difficult matter to gain immortality,--such an
immortality at least as a perishable language can give. A single ly