r work. Your taste is higher than your ambition, and you love
learning better than fame. Am I right?"

"So right that I regret I can be read so easily."

"And therefore, it may be that you would find yourself no happier with
Art than with Science. You might even fall into deeper discouragement;
for in Science every onward step is at least certain gain, but in Art
every step is groping, and success is only another form of effort. Art,
in so far as it is more divine, is more unattainable, more evanescent,
more unsubstantial. It needs as much patience as Science, and the
passionate devotion of an entire life is as nothing in comparison with
the magnitude of the work. Self-sacrifice, self-distrust, infinite
patience, infinite disappointment--such is the lot of the artist, such
the law of aspiration."

"A melancholy creed."

"But a true one. The divine is doomed to suffering, and under the hays
of the poet lurk ever the thorns of the self-immolator."

"But, amid all this record of his pains, do you render no account of his
pleasures?" I asked. "You forget that he has moments of enjoyment lofty
as his aims, and deep as his devotion.

"I do not forget it," she said. "I know it but too well. Alas! is not
the catalogue of his pleasures the more melancholy record of the two?
Hopes which sharpen disappointment; visions which cheat while they
enrapture; dreams that embitter his waking hours--fellow-student, do you
envy him these?"

"I do; believing that he would not forego them for a life of
common-place annoyances and placid pleasures."

"Forego them! Never. Who that had once been the guest of the gods would
forego the Divine for the Human? No--it is better to suffer than to
stagnate. The artist and poet is overpaid in his brief snatches of joy.
While they last, his soul sings 'at heaven's gate,' and his forehead
strikes the stars."

She spoke with a rare and passionate enthusiasm; sometimes pacing to and
fro; sometimes pausing with upturned face--

"A dauntless muse who eyes a dreadful fate!"

There was a long, long silence--she looking at the stars, I upon her
face.

By-and-by she came over to where I stood, and leaned upon the railing
that divided our separate territories.

"Friend," said she, gravely, "be content. Art is the Sphinx, and to
question her is destruction. Enjoy books, pictures, music,
statues--rifle the world of beauty to satiety, if satiety be
possible--but there pause Drink the wine; seek not to