"For Heaven's sake, do not attempt to render it any more horrible! Put it away, and finish this lovely Greek face. Oh, how I envy you your talent for music and drawing! Nature gifted you rarely!" "No! she merely gave me an intense love of beauty, which constantly impels me to embody, in melody or coloring, the glorious images which the contemplation of beauty creates in my soul. Alas! I am not a genius. If I were I might hope to achieve an immortal renown. Gladly would I pay its painful and dangerous price!" She placed the drawing of Mors in her portfolio and began to touch lightly an unfinished head of Sappho. "Ah, Clara, how connoisseurs would carp at this portrait of the 'Lesbian Muse'! My guardian, for one, would sneer, superbly." "Why, pray? It is perfectly beautiful!" "Because, forsooth, it is no low-browed, swarthy Greek. I have a penchant for high, broad, expansive foreheads, which are antagonistic to all the ancient models of beauty. Low foreheads characterize the antique; but who can fancy 'violet-crowned, immortal Sappho,' "'With that gloriole Of ebon hair, on calmed brows,' other than I have drawn her!" She held up the paper, and smiled triumphantly. In truth, it was a face of rare loveliness; of oval outline, with delicate yet noble features, whose expression seemed the reflex of the divine afflatus. The uplifted eyes beamed with the radiance of inspiration; the full, ripe lips were just parted; the curling hair clustered with child-like simplicity round the classic head; and the exquisitely formed hands clasped a lyre. "Beulah, don't you think the eyes are most too wild?" suggested Clara timidly. "What? for a poetess! Remember poesy hath madness in it," answered Beulah, still looking earnestly at her drawing. "Madness? What do you mean?" "Just what I say. I believe poetry to be the highest and purest phase of insanity. Those finely strung, curiously nervous natures that you always find coupled with poetic endowments, are characterized by a remarkable activity of the mental organs; and this continued excitement and premature development of the brain results in a disease which, under this aspect, the world offers premiums for. Though I enjoy a fine poem as much as anybody, I believe, in nine cases out of ten, it is the spasmodic vent of a highly nervous system, overstrained, diseased. Yes, diseased! If it does not result in the frantic madness of Lamb, or the final imbecility of Southey, it is manifested in various other forms, such as the morbid melancholy of Cowper, the bitter misanthropy of Pope, the abnormal moodiness and misery of Byron, the unsound and dangerous theories of Shelley, and the strange, fragmentary nature of Coleridge." "Oh, Beulah! what a humiliating theory! The poet placed on an ignominious level with the nervous hypochondriac! You are the very last person I should suppose guilty of entertaining such a degraded estimate of human powers," interposed Clara energetically.