tand a word these fellows
about me say, and I feel as I did the first time I went to Paris, before
I knew enough French to read the Master's poems. {128} Again, every one
here is mirthful and gay, and there is no man with a divinely passionate
potentiality of pain. When I first came here they were always asking me
to run with them or jump against them, and one fellow insisted I should
box with him, and hurt me very much. My potentiality of pain is
considerable. Or they would have me drive with them in these dangerous
open chariots,--me, that never rode in a hansom cab without feeling
nervous. And after dinner they sing songs of which I do not catch the
meaning of one syllable, and the music is like nothing I ever heard in my
life. And they are all abominably active and healthy. And such of their
poets as I admired--in Bohn's cribs, of course--the poets of the
Anthology, are not here at all, and the poets who are here are tremendous
proud toffs" (here Figgins relapsed into his natural style as it was
before he became a Neopagan poet), "and won't say a word to a cove. And
I'm sick of the Greeks, and the Fortunate Islands are a blooming fraud,
and oh, for paradise, give me Pentonville." With these words, perhaps
the only unaffected expression of genuine sentiment poor Figgins had ever
uttered, he relapsed into a gloomy silence. I advised him to cultivate
the society of the authors whose selected works are in the Greek
Delectus, and to try to make friends with Xenophon, whose Greek is about
as easy as that of any ancient. But I fear that Figgins, like the Rev.
Peter McSnadden, is really suffering a kind of punishment in the disguise
of a reward, and all through having accidentally found his way into what
he foolishly thought would be the right paradise for him.

Now I might have stayed long in the Fortunate Islands, yet, beautiful as
they were, I ever felt like Odysseus in the island of fair Circe. The
country was lovely and the land desirable, but the Christian souls were
not there without whom heaven itself were no paradise to me. And it
chanced that as we sat at the feast a maiden came to me with a
pomegranate on a plate of silver, and said, "Sir, thou hast now been here
for the course of a whole moon, yet hast neither eaten nor drunk of what
is set before thee. Now it is commanded that thou must taste if it were
but a seed of this pomegranate, or depart from among us." Then, making
such excuses as I might,