friends had mingled the destinies bright with
such glorious promise. Together they read the great works that appeared
above the horizon of literature and science since the Peace--the poems
of Schiller, Goethe, and Byron, the prose writings of Scott, Jean-Paul,
Berzelius, Davy, Cuvier, Lamartine, and many more. They warmed
themselves beside these great hearthfires; they tried their powers in
abortive creations, in work laid aside and taken up again with new glow
of enthusiasm. Incessantly they worked with the unwearied vitality of
youth; comrades in poverty, comrades in the consuming love of art and
science, till they forgot the hard life of the present, for their minds
were wholly bent on laying the foundations of future fame.

"Lucien," said David, "do you know what I have just received from
Paris?" He drew a tiny volume from his pocket. "Listen!"

And David read, as a poet can read, first Andre de Chenier's Idyll
_Neere_, then _Le Malade_, following on with the Elegy on a Suicide,
another elegy in the classic taste, and the last two _Iambes_.

"So that is Andre de Chenier!" Lucien exclaimed again and again.
"It fills one with despair!" he cried for the third time, when David
surrendered the book to him, unable to read further for emotion.--"A
poet rediscovered by a poet!" said Lucien, reading the signature of the
preface.

"After Chenier had written those poems, he thought that he had written
nothing worth publishing," added David.

Then Lucien in his turn read aloud the fragment of an epic called
_L'Aveugle_ and two or three of the Elegies, till, when he came upon the
line--

If they know not bliss, is there happiness on earth?

He pressed the book to his lips, and tears came to the eyes of either,
for the two friends were lovers and fellow-worshipers.

The vine-stems were changing color with the spring; covering the rifted,
battered walls of the old house where squalid cracks were spreading
in every direction, with fluted columns and knots and bas-reliefs and
uncounted masterpieces of I know not what order of architecture, erected
by fairy hands. Fancy had scattered flowers and crimson gems over the
gloomy little yard, and Chenier's _Camille_ became for David the Eve
whom he worshiped, for Lucien a great lady to whom he paid his homage.
Poetry had shaken out her starry robe above the workshop where the
"monkeys" and "bears" were grotesquely busy among types and presses.
Five o'clock struck, but the fri