tent-prop with the jewels in his turban:

"All its lordly male-sapphires, and rubies courageous at heart."

Or consider--to choose one or two pictures out of the tremendous
procession--consider Michal, Saul's royal daughter: how first she
is given in marriage to David to be a snare for him; how, loving
him, she saves his life, letting him down from the window and
dressing up an image on the bed in his place; how, later, she is
handed over to another husband Phaltiel, how David demands her
back, and she goes:

"And her husband (Phaltiel) went with her along weeping behind her
to Bahurim. Then said Abner unto him, Go, return. And he returned."

Or, still later, how the revulsion takes her, Saul's daughter as
she sees David capering home before the ark, and how her affection
had done with this emotional man of the ruddy countenance, so prone
to weep in his bed:

"And as the ark of the Lord came into the city of David, Michal,
Saul's daughter"--

Mark the three words--

"Michal, Saul's daughter looked through a window, and saw King
David leaping and dancing before the Lord; and she despised him in
her heart."

Mr. Galsworthy or Mr. W. L. George or Mr. Maxwell, who are rapidly
becoming too old-fashioned for the young, or Mrs. Wharton, or Mrs.
Gertrude Atherton would treat this episode in sympathy with what they
might conceive to be the trend of present emotion; for it is with the
emotions and not with the mind or the will that the novelist of the day
before yesterday mostly deals. If Mr. James Huneker had translated this
into the prose of his moment, it would have flamed with minutely carved
jewels, glowed with a perfume and colour of crushed roses, and choked
the reader with the odour of musk. But could he have made it any
"newer"? Or if he could have made it "newer," could he have made it more
splendid and appealing?

The old is new, and the new is old in art and literature--in life
itself, and the man who scorned Keats because Swinburne and Rossetti
were new; or who scorns Browning--the best of Browning--lacks the first
requisite of true cultivation which is founded on the truth that beauty
is beyond the touch of time. The women in Fran[c,]ois Villon's "Ballade of
Dead Ladies" are gone, but their beauty remains in that song. This
beauty might be none the less beautiful if expressed in _vers libre_;
its beau