If I might dwell Where Israfel Hath dwelt, and he where I, He might not sing so wildly well A mortal melody, While a bolder note than his might swell From my lyre within the sky,-- and that where they have, they have perhaps risen a little higher, but never have sung more hauntingly and clear. The wonderful sounds and the unearthly purity--the purity of a little child that has died--took Aladdin by the throat and shook up the imagination and music that had lain dormant within him; his father’s bent for invention clarified into a passion for creation. The first thing he read was three stanzas on the left-hand page where the book opened to his uneager hands, and his eyes, expectant of disappointment,--for up to that time, never having read any, he hated poetry,--fell on one of the five or six perfect poems in the world: Helen, thy beauty is to me Like those Nicean barks of yore That gently o’er a perfumed sea The weary, wayworn wanderer bore To his own native shore. On desperate seas long wont to roam, Thy hyacinth hair, thy classic face, Thy naiad airs have brought me home To the glory that was Greece, And the grandeur that was Rome. Lo, in yon brilliant window-niche How statue-like I see thee stand, The agate lamp within thy hand! Ah, Psyche! From the regions which Are holy land. And he knew that he had read the most exquisite, the most insouciant, and the most universal account of every man’s heart’s desire--Margaret as she would be when she grew tall. He knew little of the glory that was Greece or the grandeur that was Rome, but whatever they were, Margaret had all of them, and the hyacinth hair, very thick and clustery and beautiful, and the naiad airs. Ah, Psyche! And he read forward and back in the book, and after a little he knew that he had a soul, and that the only beautiful thing in the world is beauty, and the only sad thing, and that beauty is truth. Open at the lines to Helen he laid the book face down upon his heart, with his hands clasped over it, and shut his eyes. “Now I know what I’ve got to do,” he said. “Now I know what I’ve got to do.”