fference; there was no crime too heinous for "the great
Mr. Pope's" next verses to charge you with, and, worst of all, there
was no misdoing so out of character that his adroit malignancy could
not make it seem plausible.

Now, after another pause, Pope said, "I must be going now. Will you
not wish me luck?"

"Why, Alexander--why, hang it!" was Mr. Gay's observation, "I believe
that you are human after all, and not just a book in breeches."

He thereby voiced a commentary patently uncalled-for, as Mr. Pope
afterward reflected. Mr. Pope was then treading toward the home of old
Frederick Drew. It was a gray morning in late July.

"I love her," Pope had said. The fact was undeniable; yet an
expression of it necessarily halts. Pope knew, as every man must do
who dares conserve his energies to annotate the drama of life rather
than play a part in it, the nature of that loneliness which this
conservation breeds. Such persons may hope to win a posthumous esteem
in the library, but it is at the bleak cost of making life a wistful
transaction with foreigners. In such enforced aloofness Sarah Drew had
come to him--strong, beautiful, young, good and vital, all that he was
not--and had serenely befriended "the great Mr. Pope," whom she viewed
as a queer decrepit little gentleman of whom within a week she was
unfeignedly fond.

"I love her," Pope had said. Eh, yes, no doubt; and what, he fiercely
demanded of himself, was he--a crippled scribbler, a bungling artisan
of phrases--that he should dare to love this splendid and deep-bosomed
goddess? Something of youth awoke, possessing him--something of that
high ardor which, as he cloudily remembered now, had once controlled a
boy who dreamed in Windsor Forest and with the lightest of hearts
planned to achieve the impossible. For what is more difficult of
attainment than to achieve the perfected phrase, so worded that to
alter a syllable of its wording would be little short of sacrilege?

"What whimwhams!" decreed the great Mr. Pope, aloud. "Verse-making is
at best only the affair of idle men who write in their closets and of
idle men who read there. And as for him who polishes phrases, whatever
be his fate in poetry, it is ten to one but he must give up all the
reasonable aims of life for it."

No, he would have no more of loneliness. Henceforward Alexander Pope
would be human--like the others. To write perfectly was much; but it
was not everything. Living was c