“I think you must be, George,” said Helen. “I never knew you venture so near the edge of poetry before.” “Ah, that is all you know of me, Miss Lingard!” returned Bascombe. “--And then,” he resumed, turning again to Wingfold, “what is it they complain of? That some girls preferred a better man perhaps, or that a penny paper once told the truth of their poetry.” “Or it may be only that it is their humour to be sad,” said Wingfold. “But don’t you think,” he continued, “it is hardly worth while to be indignant with them? Their verses are a relief to them, and do nobody any harm.” “They do all the boys and girls harm that read them, and themselves who write them more harm than anybody, confirming them in tearful habits, and teaching eyes unused to weep. I quote again, I believe, but from whom I am innocent. If I ever had a grief, I should have along with it the decency to keep it to myself.” “I don’t doubt you would, George,” said his cousin, who seemed more playfully inclined than usual. “But,” she added, with a smile, “would your silence be voluntary, or enforced?” “What!” returned Bascombe, “you think I could not plain my woes to the moon? Why not I as well as another? I could roar you as ‘twere any nightingale.” “You have had your sorrows, then, George?” “Never anything worse yet than a tailor’s bill, Helen, and I hope you won’t provide me with any. I am not in love with decay. I remember a fellow at Trinity, the merriest of all our set at a wine-party, who, alone with his ink-pot, was for ever enacting the part of the unheeded poet, complaining of the hard hearts and tuneless ears of his generation. I went into his room once, and found him with the tears running down his face, a pot of stout half empty on the table, and his den all but opaque with tobacco-smoke, reciting, with sobs--I had repeated the lines so often before they ceased to amuse me, that I can never forget them-- ‘Heard’st thou a quiver and clang? In thy sleep did it make thee start? ‘Twas a chord in twain that sprang-- But the lyre-shell was my heart.’ He took a pull at the stout, laid his head on the table, and sobbed like a locomotive.” “But it’s not very bad--not bad at all, so far as I see,” said Helen, who had a woman’s weakness for the side attacked, in addition to a human partiality for fair play. “No, not bad at all--for absolute nonsense,” said Bascombe. “He had been reading Heine,” said Wingfold. “And burlesquing him,” returned Bascombe. “Fancy hearing one of the fellow’s heart-strings crack, and taking it for a string of his fiddle in the press! By the way, what are the heart-strings? Have they any anatomical synonym? But I have no doubt it was good poetry.” “Do you think poetry and common sense necessarily opposed to each other?” asked Wingfold. “I confess a leaning to that opinion,” replied Bascombe, with a half-conscious smile. “What do you say of Horace, now?” suggested Wingfold.