d the pyramid illuminates his figure and serves to
realize the poet's favorite theme in the presence of his grave. This
interesting incident is not fanciful, but is what I actually saw on an
autumn evening at Monte Tertanio the year following the poet's death.

* * * * *

A SPASM OF SENSE.

The conjunction of amiability and sense in the same individual renders
that individual's position in a world like this very disagreeable.
Amiability without sense, or sense without amiability, runs along
smoothly enough. The former takes things as they are. It receives all
glitter as pure gold, and does not see that it is custom alone which
varnishes wrong with a shiny coat of respectability, and glorifies
selfishness with the aureole of sacrifice. It sets down all collisions
as foreordained, and never observes that they occur because people will
not smooth off their angles, but sharpen them, and not only sharpen
them, but run them into you. It forgets that the Lord made man upright,
but he hath sought out many inventions. It attributes all the confusion
and inaptitude which it finds to the nature of things, and never
suspects that the Devil goes around in the night, thrusting the square
men into the round places, and the round men into the square places. It
never notices that the reason why the rope does not unwind easily is
because one strand is a world too large and another a world too small,
and so it sticks where it ought to roll, and rolls where it ought to
stick. It makes sweet, faint efforts with tender fingers and palpitating
heart to oil the wheels and polish up the machine, and does not for a
moment imagine that the hitch is owing to original incompatibility of
parts and purposes, that the whole machine must be pulled to pieces
and made over, and that nothing will be done by standing patiently by,
trying to soothe away the creaking and wheezing and groaning of the
laboring, lumbering thing, by laying on a little drop of sweet-oil with
a pin-feather. As it does not see any of these things that are happening
before its eyes, of course it is shallowly happy. And on the other hand,
he who does see them and is not amiable is grimly and Grendally happy.
He likes to say disagreeable things, and all this dismay and disaster
scatter disagreeable things broadcast along his path, so that all he
has to do is to pick them up and say them. Therefore this world is his
paradise. He would not know what