The Source! Can it be true? Oh, may it not be? May it not at last await me in that garden To which we bleed our way through all this waste?— One cup—some little chalice that will hold One drop that will not shudder into mist Till I have drained it. Passages of this sort might be duplicated in _El Dorado_, were they not too long to quote with the context necessary to them. The passage cited above holds a deep suggestion in the lines:— One drop that will not shudder into mist Till I have drained it. Here is human longing epitomized; and again the words in which Coronado speaks, as he thinks, to the shade of Beatrix,— No, I will no more strive to anything And so dispel it,— are subtly typical of the fear in all joy, the trembling dread to grasp, lest it elude us. That, too, is a fine passage in which Coronado replies to Perth, who seeks to cheer him with thought of the Water of all Dreams: Ah, that poor phantom Source! I never sought it. I have found the thing called Youth too deadly bitter To grasp at further tasting. “The thing called Youth” is often “deadly bitter;” and Mr. Torrence has well suggested it in the revulsion from hope to despair which follows upon the knowledge that El Dorado is but a land of Dead-Sea fruit. The atmosphere with which Mr. Torrence has invested the scene where all are waiting for the dawn to lift and reveal the valley of their desire is charged with mystery and portent; one becomes a tense, breathless member of the group upon the cliff, and not a spectator. Mr. Torrence is occasionally led into temptation, artistically speaking, by the seduction of his imagination, and is carried a bit beyond the point of discretion, as in this passage taken from the scene where the expedition awaits the dawn on the morning when its dream is expected to be realized. Perth and Coronado are looking to the mist to lift. Perth speaks: And now in that far edge, as though a seed Were sown, there is a hint of budding gray, A bud not wholly innocent of night, And yet a color. COR. But see, it dies! PERTH. Yet now it blooms again, Whiter, and with a rumor of hidden trumpets. Buds in the common day do not usually bloom with a “rumor of hidden trumpets.” In the same scene Coronado asks: Can you not see The gem which is the mother of all dawn? PERTH. There is some gleam. COR. It waits one moment yet Before it thunders upon our blinded sight!