As the white-haired man continued to read the appreciation of the poem, which he himself had wrought, thereby re-enacting the deception of the Mother of the Warrior-Soul, he revealed to the dying poet how his work in all the wonderful assemblance of its qualities surpassed any other that had been given to the world. He appraised the metre which only the highest inspiration would have dared to employ; he appraised the miraculous blend of gravity, sonority, sweetness, purity; the ever-gathering range and power of those mighty cadences, which swept the whole gamut of the emotions as though they were the strings of a lyre. He showed how the people of unborn ages would be able to derive stimulus and sanction for their labours; how the poet’s divine simplicity was such that he who ran might read; how the official “souls” who infest the groves of Academe would be able to cherish it for its “art”; how the humblest street-persons who walked the streets of the great city would be able to cherish it for its truth. This epic of Man the Warrior ever trampling the brakes of the Eternal Forest, cutting out the path with the Sword in his right hand in the fruitless search for that which will reconcile him to his partial vision, with the nobly pitiful irony of its conclusion that in the present stage of the Warrior’s development the reconciliation must be sought by compromise--this epic had in its austere mingling together of those elements of tragedy which purge man’s nature with the healing and co-ordinating properties which reconcile diverse and conflicting factors of experience with the primal belief of Man Himself, a universal power which had been given to no other poet in the modern or the ancient world. And the old man concluded with the prophecy that when “Civilization” itself had sunk to a mere shibboleth of the remote age of “Reason,” the half-divine, half-barbarous music of the unknown poet of the _Reconciliation_, would prove the only _via media_ between the epoch of ampler vision and that fantastic shadowography of the long ago when Man seemed other than He was. Throughout the reading of this appraisement of his labours, the blind-eyed poet seemed to vibrate with every word that came upon his ears. As each phrase uttered by that thin, high, quavering voice addressed the entranced being of the poet, the frail and broken form seemed to sway in unison therewith; and the secret and beautiful smile lurking within the hollows of the cheeks seemed to illuminate even the sightless eyes, so that poor Dodson, who sat listening faintly to the old man’s words, was tortured continually by the illusion that the sight had returned to the eyes of his dying friend.