“I do not reproach you, dear Isocrates,” said the old man, with the exquisite humility that is only begotten by wisdom. “Or if my words have chidden you it is that there is an echo in yourself. Isocrates was ever your name among us. We cannot order our destiny; we can only fulfil it.” “I was one of great projects,” said the boy’s father. “Him whom I recall had ambition burning in his veins like a chemical,” said the old man. “Yes, master,” said the boy’s father, with a curious simplicity, “but on a day he tasted the poppy that perished the red blood in his veins. From that hour he could never be what he promised. The strength was taken from his right hand.” An expression of pain escaped the lips of the aged school-master. “I foresaw that peril,” he said. “I prayed for you continually, Isocrates; and I would have forewarned you had I not feared the catastrophe so much. It is the cardinal weakness of such as myself that we fear even to gaze upon the vulnerable heel whereby the poisoned arrow enters the powerful. False preceptor hast thou been, O Socrates, to the young Plato!” The aged man seemed all broken by the sudden anguish that shook his feebleness. The boy’s father, in whose eyes the suffering of his former preceptor was reflected, raised the senile fingers to his lips with strange humility. “All the devices of the pharmacopeia,” said the boy’s father, “could not have kept the poison out of these weak veins, dear master. It is one more act of wantonness that we must lay to the door of Nature. For the poison was first compounded by the fermentation of those many diverse and potent essences with which the blood was charged. It is the curse of the age, master. It is the deadly gas exuded by the putrefaction of what we have agreed to call ‘progress,’ which fuses the nerves and the tissues into the incandescent fervour by which they destroy themselves.” “But only, Apollo, that there may be a nobler renascence.” “We shall not heed it, master, when we lie with the worms.” “Ah, no! Yet as we crouch by the fire on these cold winter evenings, is it not well to wrap ourselves in the vision of all the undeveloped glories in our midst? Is it not well for our minds to behold a William Jordan brooding in his garret among all these millions of people who will never learn his name? For thirty years have I been seeking that treatise by which he is to establish Reason on its only possible basis.” “Ah, dear master, philosophy is an anodyne for subtle minds,” said the boy’s father. “Were these your words, Isocrates, when you expounded to me that wonderful synopsis on your twentieth birthday?” “Philosophy is a narcotic which in the end destroys the cells of the brain.” “And poetry, my dear friend, what is poetry?” “I have not the courage to define it, master.” “Is this the language of despair, Isocrates?”