Recklessly, though with a diffidence as though I were with royalty, I invited him to dine, but in the cheap Childs’ Eating House where we “fed,” I soon perceived that I had no reason to feel embarrassed. A cup of coffee and “sinkers” sufficed him, he took my shyness away, he won my easy and full confidence; and afterwards--for he refused to let me go--as we sat, that stifling night, on a bench in Battery Park, tramps and Wearie Willies our neighbours, but the salt air from the sea in our nostrils, he used a phrase that, giving me the calibre of his thought, was too significant ever to be forgotten. I had spoken of my hatred of the city and of my present circumstances in it. He peered into my face a moment beneath his dreadful hat, then, raising a beautiful hand by way of emphasis, his deep voice came to me like some music of the sea itself: “No man worth his spiritual salt,” he said with impressive gentleness, “is ever entangled in locality.” He smiled, and the tenderness of the voice was in the eyes as well.... The little park emptied gradually, the heated paving-stones lost something of their furnace breath, the stars were visible overhead beyond the great arc lights, the parched leaves rustled faintly, and I spoke to him of poetry. He had lived with Longfellow, he had known Browning. The poetry of the world was in his soul--Greek, Latin, German, French, above all, Hebrew. I drank in his words, unaware of the passing hours. To me it was like finding a well in the desert when I was dying of thirst. Even the awful city he transfigured. Suddenly his lean fingers touched my arm, his voice deepened and grew soft, he took his hat off. “I will say my Night-Song to you now,” he said. “I can only say it to very, very few. For years I have said it to--no one. But _you_ shall hear it.” If there was something in his voice and manner that thrilled me to the core, the poem he then repeated on that bench in Battery Park at midnight gave me indescribable sensations of beauty and delight. I realized I listened to a personal confession that was a revelation of the mysterious old heart beneath the green frock-coat. It seemed to me that Night herself spoke through him: Known only, only to God and the night, and the stars and me! Prophetic, jubilant Song, Smiting the rock-bound hours till the waters of life flow free; And a Soul, on pinion strong, Flieth afar, and hovers over the infinite sea Of love and of melody: _While the blind fates weave their nets And the world in sleep forgets_.