"Alas! I am no /improvisatore/. Yet I will avenge myself on your former neglect of my craft by chanting to you a trifle somewhat in unison with the thought you ask me to versify, but which you would not stay to hear at Tor Hadham (though you did drop a shilling into Max's tray); it was one of the songs I sang that evening, and it was not ill-received by my humble audience. "THE BEAUTY OF THE MISTRESS IS IN THE LOVER'S EYE. "Is she not pretty, my Mabel May? Nobody ever yet called her so. Are not her lineaments faultless, say? If I must answer you plainly, No. "Joy to believe that the maid I love None but myself as she is can see; Joy that she steals from her heaven above, And is only revealed on this earth to me!" As soon as he had finished this very artless ditty, the minstrel rose and said,-- "Now I must bid you good-by. My way lies through those meadows, and yours no doubt along the high road." "Not so. Permit me to accompany you. I have a lodging not far from hence, to which the path through the fields is the shortest way." The minstrel turned a somewhat surprised and somewhat inquisitive look towards Kenelm. But feeling, perhaps, that having withheld from his fellow-traveller all confidence as to his own name and attributes, he had no right to ask any confidence from that gentleman not voluntarily made to him, he courteously said "that he wished the way were longer, since it would be so pleasantly halved," and strode forth at a brisk pace. The twilight was now closing into the brightness of a starry summer night, and the solitude of the fields was unbroken. Both these men, walking side by side, felt supremely happy. But happiness is like wine; its effect differing with the differing temperaments on which it acts. In this case garrulous and somewhat vaunting with the one man, warm-coloured, sensuous, impressionable to the influences of external Nature, as an Aeolian harp to the rise or fall of a passing wind; and, with the other man, taciturn and somewhat modestly expressed, saturnine, meditative, not indeed dull to the influences of external Nature, but deeming them of no value, save where they passed out of the domain of the sensuous into that of the intellectual, and the soul of man dictated to the soulless Nature its own questions and its own replies. The minstrel took the talk on himself, and the talk charmed his listener. It became so really eloquent in the tones of its utterance, in the frank play of its delivery, that I could no more adequately describe it than a reporter, however faithful to every word a true orator may say, can describe that which, apart from all words, belongs to the presence of the orator himself.