annot make
me as others are."

Chandos looked down on him with an almost tender compassion. To him,
whose years were so rich in every pleasure and every delight that men
can enjoy, the loneliness and pain of Lulli's life, divorced from all
the living world, made it a marvel profoundly melancholy, profoundly
formed to claim the utmost gentleness and sympathy.

"I would not have you as others are, Lulli," he said, softly. "If in all
the selfishness and pleasures of our world there were not some here and
there to give their lives to high thoughts and to unselfish things, as
you give yours, we should soon, I fear, forget that such existed. But
for such recluse's devotion to an art as yours, the classics would have
perished; without the cloister-penmen, the laws of science would never
have broken the bondage of tradition."

Lulli looked up eagerly; then his head drooped again with the
inexpressible weariness of that vain longing which "toils to reach the
stars."

"Ah, what is the best that I reach?--the breath of the wind which
passes, and sighs, and is heard no more."

* * *

"How crabbed a scroll!" he went on, throwing himself down a moment on
the thyme and grass. "The characters must baffle even you; the years
that have yellowed the vellum have altered the fashion. Whose is it?"

"An old Elizabethan musician's," answered Lulli, as he looked up. "Yes;
the years take all,--our youth, our work, our life, even our graves."

Something in his Provencal cadence gave a rhythm to his simplest speech:
the words fell sadly on his listener's ear, though on the sensuous
luxuriance of his own existence no shadow ever rested, no skeleton ever
crouched.

"Yes: the years take all," he said, with a certain sadness on him. "How
many unperfected resolves, unachieved careers, unaccomplished ambitions,
immatured discoveries, perish under the rapidity of time, as unripe
fruits fall before their season! Bichat died at thirty-one:--if he had
lived, his name would now have outshone Aristotle's."

"We live too little time to do anything even for the art we give our
life to," murmured Lulli. "When we die, our work dies with us: our
better self must perish with our bodies; the first change of fashion
will sweep it into oblivion."

"Yet something may last of it," suggested Chandos, while his hand
wandered among the blue bells of the curling hyacinths. "Because few
save scholars read the '_Defensio Populi_' now, the wor