her name was Elaine? And the company of gallant
knights who followed her as she set forth upon her quest--who were they,
and from whence did they hail? The fool of the court, with his bauble and
his cracked, meaningless laughter, danced in and out of the picture with
impish glee. Behind it all was the sunset, such a sunset as was never seen
on land or sea. Ribbons of splendid colour streamed from the horizon to
the zenith and set the shields of the knights aglow with shimmering flame.
Clashing cymbals sounded from afar, then, clear and high, a bugle call,
the winding silvery notes growing fainter and fainter till they were lost
in the purple silence of the hills. Elaine turned, smiling--was not her
name Elaine? And then----

Darkness fell and the picture was utterly wiped out. Harlan turned away
with a sigh.

To take the dead, dry bones of words, the tiny black things that march in
set spaces across the page; to set each where it inevitably
belongs--truly, it seems simple enough. But from the vast range of our
written speech to select those which fittingly clothe the thought is quite
another matter, and presupposes the thought. Even then, by necessity, the
outcome is uncertain.

Within the mind of the writer, the Book lives and breathes; a child of the
brain, yearning for birth. At a white heat, after long waiting, the words
come--merely a commentary, an index, a marginal note of that within.
Reading afterward the written words, the fine invisible links, the colour
and the music, are treacherously supplied by the imagination, which is at
once the best friend and the worst enemy. How is one to know that only a
small part of it has been written, that the best of it, far past writing,
lingers still unborn?

Long afterward, when the original picture has faded as though it had never
been, one may read his printed work, and wonder, in abject self-abasement,
by what miracle it was ever printed. He has trusted to some unknown
psychology which strongly savours of the Black Art to reproduce in the
minds of his readers the picture which was in his, and from which these
fragmentary, marginal notes were traced. Only the words, the dead,
meaningless words, stripped of all the fancy which once made them fair, to
make for the thousands the wild, delirious bliss that the writer knew! To
write with the tears falling upon the page, and afterward to read, in some
particularly poignant and searching review, that "the book fails to
conv