I mean a reasonable
nightmare, that you can ride,--not one that rides you. The imagination
then seems to scintillate nothing but beautiful images."

"I don't care to become a red-hot iron for the sake of seeing the sparks
I might radiate."

"Prosaic again! Now sin and sorrow have their advantages; the law of
compensation, you see. Poets, according to Shelley, learn in suffering
what they teach in song. And if novelists were always scrupulous, what
do you think they would write? Only milk-and-water proprieties,
tamely-virtuous platitudes. Do you think Dickens never saw a taproom or
a thief's den?--or that Thackeray is unacquainted with the "Cave of
Harmony"? No,--all the piquancy of life comes from the slight _soupcon_
of wickedness wherewithal we season it."

"I like amazingly to have you wander off in this way; you are always
entertaining, whether your ethics are sound or not."

"Don't trouble yourself about ethics. You and I are artists; we want
effects, contrasts; we must have our enthusiasms, our raptures, and our
despair."

"You ride a theory well."

"Now, my dear Greenleaf, listen. Kindly I say it, but you are a trifle
too innocent, too placid,--in short, too youthful. To paint, you must be
intense; to be intense, you must feel; and--you see I come back on the
sweep of the circle--to feel, one must have incentives, objects."

"So, you will roast your own liver to make a _pate_."

"Better so than to have the Promethean vulture peck it out for you."

"Well, if I am as you say, what am I to do? I am docile, to-day."

"Fall in love."

"I have tried the experiment."

"It must have been with some insipid girl, not out of her teens, odorous
of bread and butter, innocent of wiles, and ignorant of her
capabilities and your own."

"Perhaps, but still I have been in love,--and am."

"Bless me! that was a sigh! The sleeping waters then did show a dimple.
Why, man, _you_ talk about love, with that smooth, shepherd's face of
yours, that contented air, that smoothly sonorous voice! Corydon and
Phyllis! You should be like a grand piano after Satter has thundered out
all its chords, tremulous with harmonies verging so near to discord that
pain would be mixed with pleasure in the divinest proportions."

Greenleaf clapped his hands. "Bravo, Easelmann! you have mistaken your
vocation; you should turn musical critic."

"The arts are all akin," he replied, calmly refilling his pipe.

"I think I can put together th