ot on catgut strings or metal stops, but upon human
passions; and whose playing touches not a mere mechanism of fibres and
membranes like the ear, but the human soul, which in its turn feels and
acts; he is the artist who, if he blunders, does not merely fatigue a
nerve, or paralyze for a moment a physical sense, but injures the whole
texture of our sympathies and deafens our conscience. And I ask you,
does such an artist, playing on such an instrument, not require moral
feeling far stronger and keener than that of any other man, who, if he
mistake evil for good, injures only himself and the few around him? You
have been doubting, Cyril, whether poetry is sufficient work for a man
who feels the difference between good and evil; you might more worthily
doubt whether any man knows good from evil with instinct sure enough to
suffice him as a poet. You thought poetry morally below you: are you
certain that you are morally up to its level?"

Cyril looked vaguely about him: at the black sea breaking on the
twilight sands, at the dark outline of pine-wood against the pale sky,
at the distant village lights--vaguely, and as if he saw nothing of it
all. The damp sea breeze blew in their faces, the waves moaned sullenly,
the pines creaked in the wind; the moon, hidden behind clouds, slowly
silvered into light their looser, outer folds, then emerged, spreading a
broad white sheen on the sands and the water.

"Are you still too good for poetry?" asked Baldwin; "or--has poetry
become too good for you?"

"I don't know," answered Cyril, in the tone of a man before whose mental
eyes things are taking a new shape. "I don't know--perhaps."

POSTSCRIPT OR APOLOGY.

I have had the sense that now, before these foregoing pages be
definitely printed--before what have been living thoughts and feelings
be irrevocably composed and stiffened, embalmed, distinctly and
unmistakably prepared to last, as things are permitted to last, only in
death--I have had the sense that while yet I can, I must say one or two
more things. But now, I can scarcely tell why, it seems to me as if
there could by no means be anything to say. It is a mood, due to the
moment and place. All about me there is broad, scarce-flickering shadow
on the grass, and stirring of sunlit tree-tops and vague buzzing of
bees in the limes; and across the low ivied wall comes from the black,
crumbly-stoned chapel faint music of organ and white-sounding voices,
which swells an