ing author and used to talk with other adolescent immortals of
the joyful and sorrowful mysteries of their high calling, the dearth of
subjects was the cause of much misgiving and even despair among them.
Upon a certain occasion one of that divine company, so much diviner than
any of the sort now, made bold to affirm: "I feel that I have got my
technique perfect. I believe that my poetic art will stand the test of
any experiment in the handling of verse, and now all that I want is a
subject." It seemed a great hardship to the others, and they felt it the
more keenly because every one of them was more or less in the same case.
They might have none of them so frankly owned their fitness for their
work as the one who had spoken, but they were all as deeply aware of it;
and if any subject had appeared above the horizon there could have been
no question among them except as to which should first mount his winged
steed and ride it down. It did not occur to any of them that the want of
a subject was the defect of their art, and that until they were
equipped with the eye that never fails to see occasion for song all
round the heavens they were not yet the champions of poetry which they
fancied themselves. He who had uttered their common belief sufficiently
proved afterward, in the range of things he did, that he had ultimately
come into possession of the highest of the poetic gifts, the poetic
vision of life, and that he had completed his art at a point where it
had been most imperfect before, when he supposed it so perfect. As soon
as he ceased looking for subjects, which were mainly the conventional
themes of verse, the real and vital subjects began looking for him.

Eugenio himself, on his lower level, had something of the same
experience. When he first began those inventions in prose which long
seemed to him worthy of the best that his kindest friends said of them,
he had great trouble in contriving facts sufficiently wonderful for the
characters who were to deal with them, and characters high and noble
enough to deal with the great and exalted facts. On one hand or the
other his scheme was always giving out. The mirage of fancy which
painted itself so alluringly before him faded on his advance and left
him planted heavy-footed in the desert sands. In other words, he was
always getting out of a subject. In the intervals between his last
fiction and his next, when his friends supposed he was purposely letting
his mind lie fal