“Being mortal,” I amended, “we pick our recreations to suit our tastes. Now I, for instance—as is, indeed, a matter of some notoriety and derision here in Lichfield—am interested in what people loosely speak of as ‘the occult.’ I don’t endeavor to persuade defunct poetesses to dictate via the Ouija board effusions which give little encouragement as to the present state of culture in Paradise, or to induce Napoleon to leave wherever he is and devote his energies to tipping a table for me, you understand.... But I quite fixedly believe the Wardens of Earth sometimes unbar strange windows, that face on other worlds than ours. And some of us, I think, once in a while get a peep through these windows. But we are not permitted to get a long peep, or an unobstructed peep, nor, very certainly, are we permitted to see all there is—out yonder. The fatal fault, sir, of your theorizing is that it is too complete. It aims to throw light upon the universe, and therefore is self-evidently moonshine. The Wardens of Earth do not desire that we should understand the universe, Mr. Kennaston; it is part of Their appointed task to insure that we never do; and because of Their efficiency every notion that any man, dead, living, or unborn, might form as to the universe will necessarily prove wrong. So, if for no other reason, I must decline to think of you and me as characters in a romance.” ------------------------------------------------------------------------ _Book Fifth_ “This was the measure of my soul’s delight; It had no power of joy to fly by day, Nor part in the large lordship of the light; But in a secret moon-beholden way Had all its will of dreams and pleasant night, And all the love and life that sleepers may. “But such life’s triumph as men waking may It might not have to feed its faint delight.” ------------------------------------------------------------------------ I Of Poetic Love: Treated with Poetic Inefficiency SO much for what Kennaston termed his “serious reading” in chance-opened pages of the past. There were other dreams quite different in nature, which seemed, rather, to fulfil the function of romantic art, in satisfying his human craving for a full-fed emotional existence—dreams which Kennaston jestingly described as “_belles lettres_.” For now by turn—as murderer, saint, herdsman, serf, fop, pickpurse, troubadour, monk, bravo, lordling, monarch, and in countless other estates—Kennaston tasted those fruitless emotions which it is the privilege of art to arouse—joys without any inevitable purchase-price, regrets that were not bitter, and miseries which left him not a penny the worse.