revealed to me his gift of verse 'Ah!' I said, 'Behold I have given a tongue to the sea-cliffs.' It should never be forgotten that poetry is the Voice of the Solitary Spirit, prose the language of the sociable-minded. Solitary feeling is the substance of poetry. Facile emotion, persuasion, opinion and argument and moral purpose are the substance of prose, and belong to the sympathetic side of our nature, reaching out for companionship. This portrait of my old friend would be incomplete if I did not mention his skill as an astrologer. Through my son's influence, astrology became one of his subjects. In his horoscopes he never failed. He was eager for them. At all times he had an unsleeping industry. A horoscope cost him two days of continued effort. Give him the date and place of anyone's birth and in two days' time he would present you with a paper written out in a most attractive archaic language telling you everything--everything at any rate that was essential, past, present and to come in the life of the unknown 'native.' I say unknown, because he did not care to draw the horoscope of any person whom he knew. Still the question occurs, why did some men love this man without asking his love in return? The answer is simple: he had an interesting mind and revealed it to us. For one thing, in the matter of what I call opinions his mind was a blank, he had no opinions. A man richly endowed with instincts as countless as the threads in a piece of embroidery, each with its own intelligence as true as the instinct of a nesting bird, and yet no opinions, no more than if he were a visitant come from a distant star! And oh, the blessedness of it! It was like the peace of early morning after a night of sorrow. Sometimes here in New York I have wandered into apartments and among people where they were running some great factory for the production of opinion, anarchist, socialist, pacifist, I know not what. The din seems that of the trenches, only that instead of heroism and the sobering effect of great issues on which men stand face to face with death itself, we have small antagonism and vanity and temper, always temper; and instead of intensity, vehemence; and the pitiful mental and moral squalor of men trying to dominate, and with that end in view quite content to be shallow in feeling as in thought; quite willing, also, to insult with ugliness and to make themselves ugly--in fact, anything for effect! To be with my old friend was like entering a shaded parlour, its quiet only broken by the rustling noise of a fire burning briskly on the hearthstone.