at the title and glanced up curiously.

"Yes, that's it," Brissenden laughed. "Pretty good title, eh?
'Ephemera'--it is the one word. And you're responsible for it, what of
your _man_, who is always the erected, the vitalized inorganic, the
latest of the ephemera, the creature of temperature strutting his little
space on the thermometer. It got into my head and I had to write it to
get rid of it. Tell me what you think of it."

Martin's face, flushed at first, paled as he read on. It was perfect
art. Form triumphed over substance, if triumph it could be called where
the last conceivable atom of substance had found expression in so perfect
construction as to make Martin's head swim with delight, to put
passionate tears into his eyes, and to send chills creeping up and down
his back. It was a long poem of six or seven hundred lines, and it was a
fantastic, amazing, unearthly thing. It was terrific, impossible; and
yet there it was, scrawled in black ink across the sheets of paper. It
dealt with man and his soul-gropings in their ultimate terms, plumbing
the abysses of space for the testimony of remotest suns and rainbow
spectrums. It was a mad orgy of imagination, wassailing in the skull of
a dying man who half sobbed under his breath and was quick with the wild
flutter of fading heart-beats. The poem swung in majestic rhythm to the
cool tumult of interstellar conflict, to the onset of starry hosts, to
the impact of cold suns and the flaming up of nebular in the darkened
void; and through it all, unceasing and faint, like a silver shuttle, ran
the frail, piping voice of man, a querulous chirp amid the screaming of
planets and the crash of systems.

"There is nothing like it in literature," Martin said, when at last he
was able to speak. "It's wonderful!--wonderful! It has gone to my head.
I am drunken with it. That great, infinitesimal question--I can't shake
it out of my thoughts. That questing, eternal, ever recurring, thin
little wailing voice of man is still ringing in my ears. It is like the
dead-march of a gnat amid the trumpeting of elephants and the roaring of
lions. It is insatiable with microscopic desire. I now I'm making a
fool of myself, but the thing has obsessed me. You are--I don't know
what you are--you are wonderful, that's all. But how do you do it? How
do you do it?"

Martin paused from his rhapsody, only to break out afresh.

"I shall never write again. I am a dauber in clay.