But when the rehearsals began, Thyrsis speedily forgot this feeling. The most sensitive poet to the contrary notwithstanding, the purpose of a play is to be acted; and Thyrsis was like an inventor, who has dreamed a great machine, and now sees the parts of it appearing as solid steel and brass; sees them put together, and the great device getting actually under way. The rehearsals were held in a little hall on the East Side, and thither came the company--six men and three women. There was no furniture or setting, they all wore their street clothing, and in the beginning they went through their parts with the manuscript in their hands. And yet--they had been selected because they resembled the characters in the play; and every time they went over the lines they gave them with more feeling and understanding. So--vaguely at first, and then more clearly--the poet began to see them as incarnations of his vision. These characters had been creatures of his fancy; they had lived in it, he had walked and talked and laughed and wept with them. Now to discover them outside him--to be able to hear them with his physical ears and see them with his physical eyes--was one of the strangest experiences of his life. It was so thrilling as to be almost uncanny. It was a new kind of inspiration, of that strange “subliminal uprush” which made the mystery of his life. And it was a kind that others could experience with him. Corydon would come every day to the rehearsals, and for four or five hours at a stretch they would sit and watch and listen in a state of perfect transport. Section 7. Also, there were things not in the manuscript which were sources of interest and delight. There was Mr. Tapping, the stage director, for instance; Thyrsis could see himself writing another play, just to get Mr. Tapping in. He was a man well on in years, and wrecked by dissipation--almost bald and toothless, and with one foot crippled with gout. Yet he was a perfect geyser of activity--bounding about the stage, talking swiftly, gesticulating--like some strange gnome or cobold out of the bowels of the earth. Thyrsis was the creator of the play, so far as concerned the words; but this man was to be the creator of it on the stage. And that, too, required a kind of genius, Thyrsis perceived.