“Unfortunately for me, you have mentioned the one poet for whom I have any respect. But what I like in him is just his common sense. He never cries over spilt milk, even if the jug be broken to the bargain. But common sense would be just as good in prose as in verse.” “Possibly; but what we have of it in Horace would never have reached us but for the forms into which he has cast it. How much more enticing acorns in the cup are! I was watching two children picking them up to-day.” “That may be; there have always been more children than grown men,” returned Bascombe. “For my part, I would sweep away all illusions, and get at the heart of the affair.” “But,” said Wingfold, with the look of one who, as he tries to say it, is seeing a thing for the first time, “does not the acorn-cup belong to the acorn? May not some of what you call illusions, be the finer, or at least more ethereal qualities of the thing itself? You do not object to music in church, for instance?” Bascombe was on the point of saying he objected to it nowhere except in church, but for his aunt’s sake, or rather for his own sake in his aunt’s eyes, he restrained himself, and uttered his feelings only in a peculiar smile, of import so mingled, that its meaning was illegible ere it had quivered along his lip and vanished. “I am no metaphysician,” he said, and Wingfold accepted the dismissal of the subject. Little passed between the two men over their wine; and as neither of them cared to drink more than a couple of glasses, they soon rejoined the ladies in the drawing-room. Mrs. Ramshorn was taking her usual forty winks in her arm-chair, and their entrance did not disturb her. Helen was turning over some music. “I am looking for a song for you, George,” she said. “I want Mr. Wingfold to hear you sing, lest he should take you for a man of stone and lime.” “Never mind looking,” returned her cousin. “I will sing one you have never heard.” And seating himself at the piano, he sang the following verses. They were his own, a fact he would probably have allowed to creep out, had they met with more sympathy. His voice was a full bass one, full of tone. “Each man has his lampful, his lampful of oil; He may dull its glimmer with sorrow and toil; He may leave it unlit, and let it dry, Or wave it aloft, and hold it high: For mine, it shall burn with a fearless flame In the front of the darkness that has no name. “Sunshine and Wind?--are ye there? Ho! ho! Are ye comrades or lords, as ye shine and blow? I care not, I! I will lift my head Till ye shine and blow on my grassy bed. See, brother Sun, I am shining too! Wind, I am living as well as you! “Though the sun go out like a vagrant spark, And his daughter planets are left in the dark, I care not, I! For why should I care? I shall be hurtless, nor here nor there. Sun and Wind, let us shine and shout, For the day draws nigh when we all go out!”