"My poems are as dear to me as Homer's were to him," replied the poet, his eyes filling. "What if you _are_ forgotten? Is it not enough for the poet to have lived for the sake of beauty?" "No!" he cried passionately. "What you say is a miserable error. For the very proof of the poet's vocation is in creating the beautiful. But how know he has created it? By his own mind? Alas, the poet's mind tells him only what is beautiful to _him_! It is by fame that he knows it--fame, the gratitude of men for the beauty he has revealed to them! What is so sweet, then, as the knowledge that fame has come to him already, or surely awaits him after he is dead?" "We labour under some confusion of ideas, I fear," said Nicholas, "and, besides, are losing time. What kind of mon----" "That I leave to you," interrupted the poet. "Only, I should like my monument to be beautiful. Ah, if you but knew how all through this poor life of mine I have loved the beautiful! Never, never have I drawn near it in any visible form without almost holding my breath as though I were looking deep, deep into God's opened eyes. But it was of the epitaph I wished to speak." Hereupon, with a deeper flush, he drew from a large inside breast-pocket, that seemed to have been made for the purpose, a worn duodecimo volume, and fell to turning the much-fingered pages. "This," he murmured fondly, without looking up, "is the complete collection of my poems." "Indeed!" exclaimed Nicholas, with deep compassion. "Yes, my complete collection. I have written a great deal more, and should have liked to publish all that I have written. But it was necessary to select, and I have included here only what it was intolerable to see wasted. There is nothing I value more than a group of elegiac poems, which every single member of my large family--who are fine critics--and all my friends, pronounce very beautiful. I think it would be a good idea to inscribe a selection from one on my monument, since those who read the selection would wish to read the entire poem, and those who read the entire poem would wish to read the entire collection. I shall now favour you with these elegies." "I should be happy to hear them; but my time!" said Nicholas courteously. "The living are too impatient to wait on me; the dead too patient to be defrauded." "Surely you would not refuse to hear one of them," exclaimed the poet, his eyes flashing. "Read _one_, by all means." Nicholas seated himself on a monumental lamb. The poet passed one hand gently across his forehead, as though to brush away the stroke of rudeness; then, fixing upon Nicholas a look of infinite remoteness, he read as follows:-- "He suffered, but he murmured not; To every storm he bared his breast; He asked but for the common lot-- To be a man among the rest. "Here lies he now----" "If you ask but for the common lot," interrupted Nicholas, "you should rest content to be forgotten."