"Ah, Mac," said Clarian, enthusiastically seizing my chum's hands, "such recognition as yours is what I have yearned for, and yet--'tis you who have chiefly mocked me. It _shall_ be finished, Mac, and worthily! Do you not think I have prayed for the inspiration, that I might bestow that final, life-giving touch? Two months ago it was as near complete as it is now,--but not until this very night have I felt the power of it. Now, however, my soul is full of it, and it shall wax into a poem. This is why I sought you, dear friends, to-night; for I am too gloriously happy to be selfish, and I want you to share my happiness with me. Yes, Mac, it has come at last, the warm Promethean fire, and at last I can proclaim, '_Anch' io son pittore_!'" I gazed at the lad as he raised his voice with these last words, and was almost awed by his singular beauty. It seemed almost as if a halo should encircle his brow. There was a delicate rose-flush on his cheek that rivalled in strange loveliness the hectic color of the young mother when her first-born nestles close and fondly to her thrilled bosom, and his eyes glowed with a rare lambent light that touched one with the eloquence of a beautiful dream. Mac eyed him with equal wonder and delight, but said, teasingly,-- "Hey! so you have come at last to the 'true and the living,' have you? Art regenerate? I hope thou hast also undergone that true baphometic fire-baptism, whereof the worthy Diogenes Teufelsdröckh hath discoursed so appetizingly, causing us to long after it, none the less that he hath scrupulously refrained from expounding whatever it is." "Yes, Mac, the new life dawns upon me,--no Plotinian trance, no somnambulic introspection, but a genuine awakening of the soul to a sense of its own beauty." "Prodigious! as Dominie Sampson would say. Nay, I am not laughing at you, Clarian," said Mac, pointing to the picture; "_there_ is enough to make me believe in you, though how you achieved it I cannot imagine." "The means, Mac? Is not that rather my question than yours? We judge ourselves from within; 'others judge us by what we have done,' says Goethe. The means, ha, and the motive? Why will men seek stumblingly after these, when actually their sole concern is with the thing done? So, you two look at me,--I was but pondering,--putting a case;--so far, the means here have been simple and innocent,--my hand, my eye, my brain, my purpose; but--Mac!" added he, suddenly, after a pause, "did you never, in reading Rabelais, feel that somehow there was a profound and reverential symbolism underlying the wild froth of words in which the histories of Gargantua and Pantagruel have come down to us? that in all that _olla-podrida_ of filth, quip, jest, wicked folly, and mad wisdom, was yet hidden, like the pearl in the oyster, a deep and most mystic system of world-philosophy?" "Anan?" said Mac, looking at the boy curiously.