All forms of literature probably hold a great deal more meaning than people commonly get out of them; but prose may be likened to a cup which one can easily see to the bottom of, though it is often deeper and fuller than it looks; while verse is the fount through which thought and feeling continually bubble from the heart of things. The sources that underlie all life may be finding vent in a rhyme where the poet imagined he was breathing some little, superficial vein of his own; but in the reader he may unawares have reached the wells of inmost passion and given them release. The reader may himself live with a certain verse and be aware of it now and then merely as a teasing iterance that "From some odd corner of the mind Beats time to nothing in the brain." But suddenly some experience, or perhaps the exfoliation of the outer self through the falling away of the withered years, shall open to him its vital and cosmical significance. He shall know then that it is not an idle whisper of song, but a message to his soul from the senate where the immortals gather in secular counsel and muse the wisdom of all the centuries since humanity came to its earliest consciousness. The bearer of the message may not have known it in the translation which it wears to the receiver; each must read it in his own tongue and read meaning into it; perhaps it always takes two to make a poet, and singer and listener are the twin spheres that form one star. A valued correspondent of ours, one of those whose letters are oftener than we should like to own fraught with the suggestion of our most fortunate inspirations, believes himself to have been recently the confidant of the inner sense of certain lines in a familiar poem of Longfellow's. Its refrain had, from the first reading, chanted in the outer chamber of his ear, but suddenly, the other day, it sang to his soul with a newly realized purport in the words, "A boy's will is the wind's will, And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts."