Does your Majesty receive any impression from it? ZEUS. Well, I don't know that I could precisely parse it. But it is very pretty. Yes, I think I gain a certain impression from it. PRIEST. Do you not feel, sire, a peculiar sense of flush, of spring-tide--a direct juvenile ebullience? ZEUS. Ah, no doubt, no doubt. And a kind of nostalgia, or harking-back to happier days, a sense of their rapid passage, and their irrecoverability. Is that right? PRIEST. It is a positive divination! ZEUS. I am conscious of the agreeable recollection of an incident---- PRIEST [_with rapture_]. Ah!---- ZEUS. A little event?---- PRIEST. You make my heart beat so high, sire, that I can hardly speak. Deign, sire, to recall that incident. ZEUS [_with extreme affability_]. It was hardly an incident.... I merely happened, while you were reciting your song, to remember an occasion on which--on which Iris, at the rampart of our golden wall, bending back, was caught by the wind, and--and the contours were delicious. PRIEST. Oh! the word, the word! ZEUS [_with slight hauteur_]. I do not follow you. Her rainbow---- PRIEST. Ah! yes, sire, the rainbow, the rainbow! O what an art of incontestable divination! ZEUS [_much animated_]. But you did not say anything about a rainbow, nor describe one, nor ever mention the elements of such a bow. PRIEST. Ah! no, sire. That is the art of the New Poetry. It names nothing, it describes nothing. All that it designs to do is to place the mind of the listener--of the august and perspicacious listener--in such an attitude as that the unnamed, the undescribed object rises full in vision. The poet flings forth his melody, and to the gross ear it seems a mere tinkle of inanity. That is simply because the crowd who worship at the shrine of the Sminthean Apollo have been accustomed by an old-fashioned and ridiculously incompetent priesthood to look for an instant and mechanical relation between sound and sense. I would not exaggerate, sire; but the kind of poetry lately cultivated, not only at Delphi, but in Delos also, is simply obsolete. ZEUS [_suspiciously_]. Again I am not sure that I quite follow you. PRIEST. To your Majesty, at least, the New Poetry opens its casket as widely as the rose-bud does to the zephyr. ZEUS. I can follow that--but it rather reminds me of the Old Poetry. PRIEST. It was intended to do so. What promptitude of mind! What divine penetration! ZEUS [_affably_]. I have always believed that if I had enjoyed leisure from public life, I should have excelled in my judgment of the fine arts. [_To the_ PRIEST, _with gravity_.] You are a gifted young man. Be sure that you employ your talents with discretion. Such an intellect as yours carries responsibility with it. I shall be quite pleased to permit you to recite "The Rainbow" to me again. [_The_ PRIEST _prepares to recite it_.] ZEUS. Oh, not now! Some other time! [_Graciously dismisses the_ PRIEST.] ZEUS [_after a long pause_].