"'I was not a marrying man myself,' answered the Veronese; 'few of us were. Myself, Horace, Virgil--we were all bachelors.' "'And Lesbia!' "I said this in a low voice, for Laura was weaving bay into a chaplet, and inattentive to our conversation. "'Poor Lesbia!' said Catullus, with a suppressed sigh. 'How I misjudged that girl! How cruel, how causeless were my reproaches,' and wildly rending his curled locks and laurel crown, he fled into a thicket, whence there soon arose the melancholy notes of the Ausonian lyre.' "'He is incorrigible,' said Laura, very coldly; and she deliberately began to tear and toss away the fragments of the chaplet she had been weaving. 'I shall never break him of that habit of versifying. But they are all alike.' "'Is there nobody here,' said I, 'who is happy with his Ideal--nobody but has exchanged Ideals with some other poet?' "'There is one,' she said. 'He comes of a northern tribe; and in his life-time he never rhymed upon his unattainable lady, or if rhyme he did, the accents never carried her name to the ears of the vulgar. Look there.' "She pointed to the river at our feet, and I knew the mounted figure that was riding the ford, with a green-mantled lady beside him like the Fairy Queen. "Surely I had read of her, and knew her-- "'She whose blue eyes their secret told, Though shaded by her locks of gold.' "'They are different; I know not why. They are constant,' said Laura, and rising with an air of chagrin, she disappeared among the boughs of the trees that bear her name. "'Unhappy hearts of poets,' I mused. 'Light things and sacred they are, but even in their Paradise, and among their chosen, with every wish fulfilled, and united to their beloved, they cannot be at rest!' "Thus moralising, I wended my way to a crag, whence there was a wide prospect. Certain poets were standing there, looking down into an abyss, and to them I joined myself. "'Ah, I cannot bear it!' said a voice, and, as he turned away, his brow already clearing, his pain already forgotten, I beheld the august form of Shakespeare. "Marking my curiosity before it was expressed, he answered the unuttered question. "'That is a sight for Pagans,' he said, 'and may give them pleasure. But my Paradise were embittered if I had to watch the sorrows of others, and their torments, however well deserved. The others are gazing on the purgatory of critics and commentators.' "He passed from me, and I joined the 'Ionian father of the rest'--Homer, who, with a countenance of unspeakable majesty, was seated on a throne of rock, between the Mantuan Virgil of the laurel crown, Hugo, Sophocles, Milton, Lovelace, Tennyson, and Shelley.