"Enough! I think I had something in me then,--something that was new and wild and, though it may seem self praise to say so, full of that witching glamour we name Inspiration; but whatever that something was, call it genius, a trick of song, what you will,--it was soon crushed out of me. The world is fond of slaying its singing buds and devouring them for daily fare--one rough pressure of finger and thumb on the little melodious throats, and they are mute forever. So I found, when at last in mingled pride, hope, and fear I published my poems, seeking for them no other recompense save fair hearing and justice. They obtained neither--they were tossed carelessly by a few critics from hand to hand, jeered at for a while, and finally flung back to me as lies--lies all! The finely spun web of any fancy,--the delicate interwoven intricacies of thought,--these were torn to shreds with as little compunction as idle children feel when destroying for their own cruel sport the velvety wonder of a moth's wing, or the radiant rose and emerald pinions of a dragon-fly. I was a fool--so I was told with many a languid sneer and stale jest--to talk of hidden mysteries in the whisper of the wind and the dash of the waves--such sounds were but common cause and effect. The stars were merely conglomerated masses of heated vapor condensed by the work of ages into meteorites and from meteorites into worlds--and these went on rolling in their appointed orbits, for what reason nobody knew, but then nobody cared! And Love--the key-note of the theme to which I had set my mistaken life in tune--Love was only a graceful word used to politely define the low but very general sentiment of coarse animal attraction--in short, poetry such as mine was altogether absurd and out of date when confronted with the facts of every-day existence--facts which plainly taught us that man's chief business here below was simply to live, breed, and die--the life of a silk-worm or caterpillar on a slightly higher platform of ability; beyond this--nothing!" "Nothing?" murmured Heliobas, in a tone of suggestive inquiry--"really nothing?"