ve the divining rod-to walk clear of shams. He is the teacher who
shows where power exists: he is the leader who wakens and forms it. Why
have I unfailingly succeeded?--I never doubted! The world voluntarily
opens a path to those who step determinedly. You--to your honour?--I
won't decide--but you have the longest in my experience resisted. I have
a Durandal to hew the mountain walls; I have a voice for ears, a net for
butterflies, a hook for fish, and desperation to plunge into marshes: but
the feu follet will not be caught. One must wait--wait till her desire to
have a soul bids her come to us. She has come! A soul is hers: and see
how, instantly, the old monster, the world, which has no soul--not yet:
we are helping it to get one--becomes a shadow, powerless to stop or
overawe. For I do give you a soul, think as you will of it. I give you
strength to realize, courage to act. It is the soul that does things in
this life--the rest is vapour. How do we distinguish love?--as we do
music by the pure note won from resolute strings. The tense chord is
music, and it is love. This higher and higher mountain air, with you
beside me, sweeps me like a harp.'

'Oh! talk on, talk on! talk ever! do not cease talking to me!' exclaimed
Clotilde.

'You feel the mountain spirit?'

'I feel that you reveal it.'

'Tell me the books you have been reading.'

'Oh, light literature-poor stuff.'

'When we two read together you will not say that. Light literature is the
garden and the orchard, the fountain, the rainbow, the far view; the view
within us as well as without. Our blood runs through it, our history in
the quick. The Philistine detests it, because he has no view, out or in.
The dry confess they are cut off from the living tree, peeled and
sapless, when they condemn it. The vulgar demand to have their pleasures
in their own likeness--and let them swamp their troughs! they shall not
degrade the fame of noble fiction. We are the choice public, which will
have good writing for light reading. Poet, novelist, essayist, dramatist,
shall be ranked honourable in my Republic. I am neither, but a man of
law, a student of the sciences, a politician, on the road to government
and statecraft: and yet I say I have learnt as much from light literature
as from heavy-as much, that is, from the pictures of our human blood in
motion as from the clever assortment of our forefatherly heaps of bones.
Shun those who cry out against fiction and have no