st draft of a composer's score, and the poet, deftly
picking his way among the erasures and interlineations, read aloud the
beautiful words--with a full sense of their beauty!--to ears that deemed
them more beautiful even than they were. The owners of this now valuable
copyright allow me to irradiate my prose with three of the verses.

'Ah! what,' half-chanted, half-crooned the poet--

'Ah! what a garden is your hair!--
Such treasure as the kings of old,
In coffers of the beaten gold,
Laid up on earth--and left it there.'

So tender a reference to hair whose beauty others beside the poet had
loved must needs make a tender interruption--the only kind of
interruption the poet could have forgiven--and 'Who,' he continued--

'Who was the artist of your mouth?
What master out of old Japan
Wrought it so dangerous to man ...'

And here it was but natural that laughter and kisses should once more
interrupt--

'Those strange blue jewels of your eyes,
Painting the lily of your face,
What goldsmith set them in their place--
Forget-me-nots of Paradise?

'And that blest river of your voice,
Whose merry silver stirs the rest
Of water-lilies in your breast ...'

At last, in spite of more interruptions, the poem came to an
end--whereupon, of course, the poet immediately read it through once
more from the beginning, its personal and emotional elements, he felt,
having been done more justice on a first reading than its artistic
excellences.

'Why, darling, it is splendid,' was his little sweetheart's comment;
'you know how happy it makes me to think it was written for me, don't
you?' And she took his hands and looked up at him with eyes like the
morning sky.

Romance in poetry is almost exclusively associated with very refined
ethereal matters, stars and flowers and such like--happily, in actual
life it is often associated with much humbler objects. Lovers, like
children, can make their paradises out of the quaintest materials.
Indeed, our paradises, if we only knew, are always cheap enough; it is
our hells that are so expensive. Now these lovers--like, if I mistake
not, many other true lovers before and since--when they were
particularly happy, when some special piece of good luck had befallen
them, could think of no better paradise than a little dinner together in
their seventh-story heaven. 'Ah! wilderness were Paradise enow!'

To-night was obviously such an occasion. But,