"So, so!" he was declaiming, later on: "_We, too, are kin To dreams and visions; and our little life Is gilded by such faint and cloud-wrapped suns_--Only, that needs a homelier touch. Rather, let us say, _We are such stuff As dreams are made on_--Oh, good, good!--Now to pad out the line. . . . In any event, the Bermudas are a seasonable topic. Now here, instead of _thickly-templed India_, suppose we write _the still-vexed Bermoothes_--Good, good! It fits in well enough. . . ." And so in clerkly fashion he sat about the accomplishment of his stint of labor in time for dinner. A competent workman is not disastrously upset by interruption; and, indeed, he found the notion of surprising Judith with an unlooked-for trinket or so to be at first a very efficacious spur to composition. And presently the strong joy of creating kindled in him, and phrase flowed abreast with thought, and the playmaker wrote fluently and surely to an accompaniment of contented ejaculations. He regretted nothing, he would not now have laid aside his pen to take up a scepter. For surely--he would have said--to live untroubled, and weave beautiful and winsome dreams is the most desirable of human fates. But he did not consciously think of this, because he was midcourse in the evoking of a mimic tempest which, having purged its victims of unkindliness and error, aimed (in the end) only to sink into an amiable calm. CONCERNING CORINNA "_Dr. Herrick told me that, in common with all the Enlightened or Illuminated Brothers, of which prying sect the age breeds so many, he trusted the great lines of Nature, not in the whole, but in part, as they believed Nature was in certain senses not true, and a betrayer, and that she was not wholly the benevolent power to endow, as accorded with the prevailing deceived notion of the vulgar. But he wished not to discuss more particularly than thus, as he had drawn up to himself a certain frontier of reticence; and so fell to petting a great black pig, of which he made an unseemly companion, and to talking idly._" A Gyges ring they bear about them still, To be, and not, seen when and where they will; They tread on clouds, and though they sometimes fall, They fall like dew, and make no noise at all: So silently they one to th' other come As colors steal into the pear or plum; And air-like, leave no pression to be seen Where'er they met, or parting place has been. ROBERT HERRICK.--_My Lovers how They Come and Part_. CONCERNING CORINNA The matter hinges entirely upon whether or not Robert Herrick was insane. Sir Thomas Browne always preferred to think that he was; whereas Philip Borsdale perversely considered the answer to be optional. Perversely, Sir Thomas protested, because he said that to believe in Herrick's sanity was not conducive to your own.