“‘Here let me, careless and unthoughtful lying, Hear the soft winds above me flying, With all their wanton boughs dispute, And the more tuneful birds to both replying; Nor be myself too mute.’ “What say you to that wish? If you have a germ of poetry in you such verse ought to bring it into flower.” “Ay,” answered I, though not exactly in accordance with the truth; “but I have not that germ. I destroyed it four years ago. Reading the dedications of poets cured me of the love for poetry. What a pity that the Divine Inspiration should have for its oracles such mean souls!” “Yes, and how industrious the good gentlemen are in debasing themselves! Their ingenuity is never half so much shown in a simile as in a compliment; I know nothing in nature more melancholy than the discovery of any meanness in a great man. There is so little to redeem the dry mass of follies and errors from which the materials of this life are composed, that anything to love or to reverence becomes, as it were, the sabbath for the mind. It is better to feel, as we grow older, how the respite is abridged, and how the few objects left to our admiration are abased. What a foe not only to life, but to all that dignifies and ennobles it, is Time! Our affections and our pleasures resemble those fabulous trees described by Saint Oderic: the fruits which they bring forth are no sooner ripened into maturity than they are transformed into birds and fly away. But these reflections cannot yet be familiar to you. Let us return to Cowley. Do you feel any sympathy with his prose writings? For some minds they have a great attraction.” “They have for mine,” answered I: “but then I am naturally a dreamer; and a contemplative egotist is always to me a mirror in which I behold myself.” “The world,” answered St. John, with a melancholy smile, “will soon dissolve, or forever confirm, your humour for dreaming; in either case, Cowley will not be less a favourite. But you must, like me, have long toiled in the heat and travail of business, or of pleasure, which is more wearisome still, in order fully to sympathize with those beautiful panegyrics upon solitude which make perhaps the finest passages in Cowley. I have often thought that he whom God hath gifted with a love of retirement possesses, as it were, an extra sense. And among what our poet so eloquently calls ‘the vast and noble scenes of Nature,’ we find the balm for the wounds we have sustained among the ‘pitiful shifts of policy;’ for the attachment to solitude is the surest preservative from the ills of life: and I know not if the Romans ever instilled, under allegory, a sublimer truth than when they inculcated the belief that those inspired by Feronia, the goddess of woods and forests, could walk barefoot and uninjured over burning coals.”