come under your windows, some fine spring morning, and play you one
of my adagio movements, and some of you say,--This is good,--play
us so always. But, dear friends, if I did not change the stop
sometimes, the machine would wear out in one part and rust in
another. How easily this or that tune flows!--you say,--there must
be no end of just such melodies in him.--I will open the poor
machine for you one moment, and you shall look.--Ah! Every note
marks where a spur of steel has been driven in. It is easy to
grind out the song, but to plant these bristling points which make
it was the painful task of time.

I don't like to say it,--he continued,--but poets commonly have no
larger stock of tunes than hand-organs; and when you hear them
piping up under your window, you know pretty well what to expect.
The more stops, the better. Do let them all be pulled out in their
turn!

So spoke my friend, the Poet, and read me one of his stateliest
songs, and after it a gay chanson, and then a string of epigrams.
All true,--he said,--all flowers of his soul; only one with the
corolla spread, and another with its disk half opened, and the
third with the heart-leaves covered up and only a petal or two
showing its tip through the calyx. The water-lily is the type of
the poet's soul,--he told me.

--What do you think, Sir,--said the divinity-student,--opens the
souls of poets most fully?

Why, there must be the internal force and the external stimulus.
Neither is enough by itself. A rose will not flower in the dark,
and a fern will not flower anywhere.

What do I think is the true sunshine that opens the poet's
corolla?--I don't like to say. They spoil a good many, I am
afraid; or at least they shine on a good many that never come to
anything.

Who are THEY?--said the schoolmistress.

Women. Their love first inspires the poet, and their praise is his
best reward.

The schoolmistress reddened a little, but looked pleased.--Did I
really think so?--I do think so; I never feel safe until I have
pleased them; I don't think they are the first to see one's
defects, but they are the first to catch the color and fragrance of
a true poem. Fit the same intellect to a man and it is a
bow-string,--to a woman and it is a harp-string. She is vibratile and
resonant all over, so she stirs with slighter musical tremblings of
the air about her.--Ah, me!--said my friend, the Poet, to me, the
other day,--what color would it not have