ll the shadows here, is the most distinguished by the
fair. He was not a poet, you know; he got in on account of Sappho, who
adored him. They are estranged now, of course.'

"'You interest me deeply,' I answered. 'And now, will you kindly tell me
why these ladies are here, if they were not poets?'

"'The women that were our ideals while we dwelt on earth, the women we
loved but never won, or, at all events, never wedded, they for whom we
sighed while in the arms of a recognised and legitimate affection, have
been chosen by the Olympians to keep us company in Paradise!'

"'Then wherefore,' I interrupted, 'do I see Robert Burns loitering with
that lady in a ruff,--Cassandra, I make no doubt--Ronsard's Cassandra?
And why is the incomparable Clarinda inseparable from Petrarch; and Miss
Patty Blount, Pope's flame, from the Syrian Meleager, while _his_
Heliodore is manifestly devoted to Mr. Emerson, whom, by the way, I am
delighted, if rather surprised, to see here?'

"'Ah,' said Catullus, 'you are a new-comer among us. Poets will be
poets, and no sooner have they attained their desire, and dwelt in the
company of their earthly Ideals, than they feel strangely, yet
irresistibly drawn to Another. So it was in life, so it will ever be. No
Ideal can survive a daily companionship, and fortunate is the poet who
did not marry his first love!'

"'As far as that goes,' I answered, 'most of you were highly favoured;
indeed, I do not remember any poet whose Ideal was his wife, or whose
first love led him to the altar.'

"'I was not a marrying man myself,' answered the Veronese; 'few of us
were. Myself, Horace, Virgil--we were all bachelors.'

"'And Lesbia!'

"I said this in a low voice, for Laura was weaving bay into a chaplet,
and inattentive to our conversation.

"'Poor Lesbia!' said Catullus, with a suppressed sigh. 'How I misjudged
that girl! How cruel, how causeless were my reproaches,' and wildly
rending his curled locks and laurel crown, he fled into a thicket, whence
there soon arose the melancholy notes of the Ausonian lyre.'

"'He is incorrigible,' said Laura, very coldly; and she deliberately
began to tear and toss away the fragments of the chaplet she had been
weaving. 'I shall never break him of that habit of versifying. But they
are all alike.'

"'Is there nobody here,' said I, 'who is happy with his Ideal--nobody but
has exchanged Ideals with some other poet?'

"'There is one,' she said. 'He com