nterpenetrating, and he thought he might talk the matter
over better with Olive. Just then a little boy came in, and bargained
with Gifted for a Jews-harp, which, having obtained, he placed against
his teeth, and began playing upon it with a pleasure almost equal to that
of the young poet reciting his own verses.

"A little too much like my friend Gifted Hopkins's poetry," Cyprian said,
as he left the "store." "All in one note, pretty much. Not a great many
tunes, 'Hi Betty Martin,' 'Yankee Doodle,' and one or two more like them.
But many people seem to like them, and I don't doubt it is as exciting to
Gifted to write them as it is to a great genius to express itself in a
poem."

Cyprian was, perhaps, too exacting. He loved too well the sweet
intricacies of Spenser, the majestic and subtly interwoven harmonies of
Milton. These made him impatient of the simpler strains of Gifted
Hopkins.

Though he himself never wrote verses, he had some qualities which his
friend the poet may have undervalued in comparison with the talent of
modelling the symmetries of verse and adjusting the correspondences of
rhyme. He had kept in a singular degree all the sensibilities of
childhood, its simplicity, its reverence. It seemed as if nothing of all
that he met in his daily life was common or unclean to him, for there was
no mordant in his nature for what was coarse or vile, and all else he
could not help idealizing into its own conception of itself, so to speak.
He loved the leaf after its kind as well as the flower, and the root as
well as the leaf, and did not exhaust his capacity of affection or
admiration on the blossom or bud upon which his friend the poet lavished
the wealth of his verse. Thus Nature took him into her confidence. She
loves the men of science well, and tells them all her family
secrets,--who is the father of this or that member of the group, who is
brother, sister, cousin, and so on, through all the circle of
relationship. But there are others to whom she tells her dreams; not
what species or genus her lily belongs to, but what vague thought it has
when it dresses in white, or what memory of its birthplace that is which
we call its fragrance. Cyprian was one of these. Yet he was not a
complete nature. He required another and a wholly different one to be
the complement of his own. Olive came as near it as a sister could,
but--we must borrow an old image--moonlight is no more than a cold and
vacant glim