The girl gazed about her again in uncertainty, and Thyrsis swept on
in his swift, half-incoherent exclamations. He would take no
refusal; for half his madness was terror of himself, and he knew it.
And then suddenly, as he cried out to her, the girl whispered,
faintly, "All right!" And his heart gave a throb that hurt him.

"I'll tell you," she went on, hastily, "I was going to the store for
something, and they expect me home. But wait here till I get back,
and then I'll go with you."

"You mean it?" whispered Thyrsis. "You mean it?"

"Yes, yes," she answered.

"And it will be soon?"

"Yes, soon."

"All right," said he. "But first give me a kiss." As she held up her
face, Thyrsis pressed her to him, and kissed her again and again,
until her cheeks were aflame. At last he released her, and she
turned swiftly and darted up the street.

Section 11. And after she was gone the boy stood there motionless,
not stirring even a hand. A full minute passed, and the color went
out of his cheeks, and the fire out of his veins, and he could
hardly stand erect. His head sunk lower and lower, until suddenly he
whispered hoarsely, under his breath, "Oh, my God! Oh, my God!"

He looked up at the sky, his face ghastly white; and there came from
his throat a low moan, like that of a wounded animal. Suddenly he
turned, and fled away down the street.

He went on and on, block after block; but then, all at once, he
stopped again and faced about. He gripped his hands until the nails
cut him, and shut his teeth together like a steel-trap. "No, no!" he
muttered. "No--you coward!"

He turned and began to march, grimly, as a soldier might; he went
back, and stopped on the spot from which he had come; and there he
stood, like a statue. So one minute passed, then another; and at
last a shadow moved in the distance, and a step came near. It was
the girl.

"Here I am," she whispered, laughing.

"Yes," said Thyrsis. "I have something I must say to you, please."

She noticed the change in a flash, and she stopped. "What's the
matter?"

"I don't know just how to tell you," said Thyrsis, in a low,
quivering voice. "I've been a hound, and now I don't want to be a
cad. But I'm sorry for what we were talking about."

"You mean what _you_ were talking about, don't you?" demanded the
girl, her eyes flashing.

Thyrsis dropped his glance. "Yes," he said. "I am a cur. I beg your
pardon. I am so ashamed of myself that I don't know what to do. But,
oh, I was crazy. I couldn't help it! and I--I'm so sorry!" There
were tears in his voice.

"Humph," said the girl, "it's all right."

"No," said Thyrsis, "it's all wrong. It's dreadful--it's horrible.
I don't know what I should have done---"

"Well, you better not do it any more, that's all," said she. "I'm
sure you needn't worry about me--I'll take care of myself."

Thyrsis looked at her again; she was no longer beautiful. Her face
was coarse, and her anger did not make it any better. His humility
made no impression.

"It is so wrong---" he began; but she interrupted him.

"Preaching won't help it any," she said. "I don't want to hear it.
Good-bye."

So she turned and walked away; and Thyrsis stood there, white, and
shuddering, until at last he started and strode off. Clear through
the town he went, and out into the black country beyond, seeing
nothing, caring about nothing. He flung himself down by the
roadside, and lay there moaning for hours: "My God, my God, what
shall I do?"

Section 12. It was nearly morning when he came back and crept
upstairs to his room; and here he sat by the bedside, gazing at the
haggard face in the glass. At such times as this he discovered a
something in his features that filled him with shuddering; he
discovered it in his words, and in the very tone of his voice--the
sins of the fathers were being visited upon the children! What an
old, old story it was to him--this anguish and remorse! These
ecstasies of resolution that vanished like a cloud-wrack--these
protestations and noble sentiments that counted for naught in
conduct! And his was to be the whole heritage of impotence and
futility; he, too, was to struggle and agonize--and to finish with
his foot in the trap!

This idea was like a white-hot goad to him. After such an experience
there would be several months of toil and penance, and of savage
self-immolation. It was hard to punish a man who had so little; but
Thyrsis managed to find ways. For several months at a time he would
go without those kinds of food that he liked; and instead of going
to bed at one o'clock he would read the New Testament in Greek for
an hour. He would leap out of bed in the morning and plunge into
cold water; and at night, when he felt a longing upon him, he would
go out and run for hours.

He took to keeping diaries and writing exhortations to himself.
Because he could no longer use the theological prayers he had been
taught, he fashioned new invocations for himself: prayers to the
unknown sources of his vision, to the new powers of his own
soul--"the undiscovered gods," as he called them. Above all he
prayed to his vision of the maiden who waited the issue of this
battle, and held the crown of victory in her keeping--

   "Somewhere beneath the sun,
      Those quivering heart-strings prove it,
    Somewhere there must be one
      Made for this soul to love it--

    Some one whom I could court
      With no great change of manner,
    Still holding reason's fort,
      While waving fancy's banner!"

All of which things made a subtle change in his attitude to Corydon,
whom he still met occasionally. Corydon was now a young lady,
beautiful, even stately, with an indescribable atmosphere of
gentleness and purity about her. All things unclean shrunk from her
presence; and so in times of distress he liked to be with her. He
would drop vague hints as to sufferings and temptations, and told
her that she seemed like a "goddess" to him.

Corydon received this with some awe, but with more perplexity. She
could not understand why anyone should struggle so much, or why a
youth should take such a sombre view of things. But she was
perfectly willing to seem like a "goddess" to anyone, and she was
glad if that helped him. She was touched when he read her a poem of
his own, a poem which he held very precious. He called it

   "A song of the young-eyed Cherubim
    In the days of the making of man."

And in it he had set forth the view of life that had come to him--

   "The quest of the spirit's gain--
      Lured by the graces of pleasure,
    And lashed by the furies of pain.
      Thy weakness shall sigh for an Eden,
    But the sword shall flame at the gate;
      For far is the home of thy vision
    And strong is the hand of thy fate!"

Section 13. Though Thyrsis had no time to realize it, it was in this
long and bitter struggle that he won whatever power he had in his
future life. It was here that he learned "to hold his will above him
as his law", and to defy the world for the sake of his ideal. And
then, too, this toil was the key that opened to him the
treasure-house of a new art--which was music.

Until he was nearly out of college Thyrsis had scarcely heard any
music at all. Church-hymns he had learned, and a few songs in
school. But now in poetry and other books he met with references to
composers, and to the meaning of great music; and the things that
were described there were the things he loved, and he began to feel
a great eagerness to get at them. As a first step he bought a
mandolin, and set to work to teach himself to play, a task at which
he wrought with great diligence. At the same time a friend had
bought a guitar, and the two set to work to play duets. The first
preliminary was the getting of the instruments in tune; and not
knowing that the mandolin is an octave higher than the guitar, they
spent a great deal of time and broke a great many guitar-strings.

As the next step, Thyrsis went to hear a great pianist, and sat
perplexed and wondering. There was a girl next to him who sobbed,
and Thyrsis watched her as he might have watched a house on fire.
Only once the pianist pleased _him_--when he played a pretty little
piece called somebody's "impromptu", in which he got a gleam of a
"tune." Poor Thyrsis went and got that piece, and took it home to
study it, with the help of the mandolin; but, alas, in the maze of
notes he could not even find the "tune."

But if he could not understand the music, he could read books about
it; he read a whole library--criticism of music, analysis of music,
histories of music, composers of music; and so gradually he learned
the difference between a sarabande and a symphony, and began to get
some idea of what he went out for to hear. At first, at the
concerts, all he could think of was to crane his neck and recognize
the different instruments; he heard whole symphonies, while doing
nothing but watching for the "movements," and making sure he hadn't
skipped any. One heartless composer ran two movements into one, and
so Thyrsis' concert came out one piece short at the end, and he sat
gazing about him in consternation when the audience rose to go.
Afterwards he read long dissertations about each symphony before he
went, and he would note down the important points and watch for
them. The critic would expatiate upon "the long-drawn dissonance
_forte_, that marks the close of the working-out portion"; and
Thyrsis would watch for that long-drawn dissonance, and be wondering
if it was never coming--when suddenly the whole symphony would come
to an end! Or he would read about a "quaint capering measure led off
by the bassoons," or a "frantic sweep of the violins over a trombone
melody," and he would watch for these events with eyes and ears
alert, and if he found them--_eureka_!

But such things could not last forever; for Thyrsis had a heart full
of eagerness and love, and of such is the soul of music. And just
then was a time when he was sick and worn--when it seemed to him
that the burden of his life was more than he could bear. He was
haunted by the thought that he would lose his long battle, that he
would go under and go down; and then it was that chance took him to
a concert which closed with the great "C-Minor Symphony."

Thyrsis had read a life of Beethoven, and he knew that here was one
of the hero-souls--a man who had grappled with the fiends, and
passed through the valley of death. And now he read accounts of this
titan symphony, and learned that it was a battle of the human spirit
with despair. He read Beethoven's words about the opening theme--"So
knocks fate upon the door!" And a fierce and overwhelming longing
possessed him to get at the soul of that symphony.

He went to the concert, and heard nothing of the rest of the music,
but sat like a man in a dream; and when the time came for the
symphony, he was trembling with excitement. There was a long
silence; and then suddenly came the first theme--those fearful
hammer-strokes that cannot be thought without a shudder. They beat
upon Thyrsis' very heart-strings, and he sat appalled; and straight
out he went upon the tide of that mighty music-passion--without
knowing it, without knowing how. He forgot that he was trying to
understand a symphony; he forgot where he was, and what he was; he
only knew that gigantic phantoms surged within him, that his soul
was a hundred times itself. He never guessed that an orchestra was
playing a second theme; he only knew that he saw a light gleam out
of the storm, that he heard a voice, pitiful, fearful, beautiful
beyond utterance, crying out to the furies for mercy; and that then
the storm closed over it with a roar. Again and again it rose;
Thyrsis did not know that this was the "working-out portion" that
had forever been his bane. He only knew that it struggled and fought
his fight, that it pleaded and sobbed, and rose higher and higher,
and began to rejoice--and that then came the great black
phantom-shape sweeping over it; and the iron hammer-strokes of Fate
beat down upon it, crushed it and trampled it into annihilation.
Again and again this happened, while Thyrsis sat clutching the seat,
and shaking with wonder and excitement. Never in his experience had
there been anything so vast, so awful; it was more than he could
bear, and when the first movement came to an end--when the soul's
last hope was dead--he got up and rushed out. People who passed him
on the streets must have thought that he was crazy; and afterwards,
that day and forever, he lived all his soul's life in music.

As a result of this Thyrsis paid all his bank-account for a violin,
and went to see a teacher.

"You are too old," the teacher said.

But Thyrsis answered, "I will work as no one ever worked before."

"We all do that," replied the other, with a smile. And so they
began.

And so all day long, with fingers raw, and arms and back shuddering
with exhaustion, Thyrsis sat and practiced, the spirit of Music
beckoning him on. It was in a boarding-house, and there was a
nervous old man in the next room, and in the end Thyrsis had to
move. By the time he went away to the country, he was able to play a
melody in tune; and then he would take some one that had fascinated
him, and practice it and practice it night and day. He would take
his fiddle every morning at eight and stride out into the forest,
and there he would stay all day with the squirrels. They told him
once how a new arrival, driving over in the hotel 'bus at early
dawn, had passed an old Italian woman toiling up a hill and singing
for dear life the "Tannhauser March." It chanced that the new
arrival was a musician, and he leaned out and asked the old woman
where she had learned it. And this was her explanation;

"Dey ees a crazy feller in de woods--he play it all day for tree
weeks!"

Section 14. By this time Thyrsis had finished at college, passing
comfortably near the bottom of his class, and had betaken himself to
a university as a graduate student. He was duly registered for a lot
of courses, and spent his time when he should have been at the
lectures, sitting in a vacant class-room reading the book that had
fascinated him last. His note-book began at that time to show two
volumes a day on an average, and once or twice he stopped at night
to wonder how it had actually been possible for him to read poetry
fourteen hours a day for a whole week and not be tired.

He taught himself German, and that led to another great
discovery--he made the acquaintance of Goethe. The power of that
mighty spirit took hold of him, so that he prayed to him when he was
lonely, and kept the photograph of the young poet in his pocket, to
gaze at it as at a lover. The great eyes came to haunt him so that
one night he awoke crying out, because he had dreamed he was going
to meet Goethe.

In the catalog of the university there were listed a number of
courses in "rhetoric and English composition". They were for the
purpose of teaching one how to write, and the catalog set forth
convincingly the methods whereby this was done. Thyrsis wished to
know all there was to know about writing, and so ne enrolled himself
for an advanced course, and went for an hour every day and listened
to expositions of the elements of sentence-structure by Prof.
Osborne, author of "American Prose Writers" and "The Science of
Rhetoric". The professor would give him a theme, and bid him bring
in a five-hundred word composition. Perhaps it was that Thyrsis was
lacking in the play-spirit; at any rate he could not write
convincingly on the subject of "The Duty of the College Man to
Support Athletics." He struggled for a month against his own
impotence, and then went to see his instructor.

"I think," he said, "I shall have to drop Course A."

The professor gazed over his spectacles at him.

"Why?"

"I don't think I am getting any good out of it."

"But how can you tell what good you are getting?"

"I don't seem to feel that I am," said Thyrsis, deprecatingly.

"It is not to be supposed that you would feel it," said the
other--"not at this early stage. You must wait."

"But I don't like the method, sir."

"What's wrong with the method?"

Thyrsis was embarrassed. He was not sure, he said; but he did not
think that writing could be taught. Anyway, one had first to have
something worth saying--

"Are you laboring under the delusion that you know anything about
writing?" demanded the professor. (He had written across Thyrsis'
last composition the words, "Feeble and trivial".)

"Why, no," began the boy.

"Because if you are, let me disabuse your mind at once. There is no
one in the class who knows less about writing than yourself."

"I think," said Thyrsis, "it's because I can't bring myself to write
in cold blood. I have to be interested. I'm sure that is the
trouble."

"I'm sure," said the other, "that the trouble is that you think you
know too much."

"I'm sorry, sir," said Thyrsis, humbly. "I've tried my best---"

"It is my business to teach students to write. I've given my life to
that, and I think I know something about it. But you think you know
more than I do. That's all."

And so they parted. Thyrsis kept a vivid recollection of this
interview, for the reason that at a later stage of his career he
came into contact with Prof. Osborne again, and got another glimpse
of the authoritarian attitude towards the art of letters.

Section 15. Thyrsis had not many friends at college, and none at all
at the university. He had no time to make any; and besides, there
was a certain facetious senior who had caught him hurrying through
the corridors one day, declaring in excitement that---

   "Banners yellow, glorious, golden,
    On its roof did float and flow!"

But he had long ago ceased to hope for a friend, or to care what
anybody thought about him; it was clear to him by this time that he
had made himself into a poet, and was doomed to be unhappy. His
mother had given up all hope of seeing him a bishop, and they had
compromised upon a judgeship; but here at the university there was a
law-school, and he met the students, and saw that this, too, could
not be. These "lawyers" were not seeking knowledge for the love of
it--they were studying a trade, by which they could rise in the
world. They were not going out to do battle for truth and
justice--they were perfecting themselves in cunning, so that they
might be of help in money-disputes; they were sharpening their wits,
to make them useful tools for the opening of treasure-chests. And
this attitude to life was written all over their personalities; they
seemed to Thyrsis a coarse and roistering crew, and he shrunk from
them in repugnance.

He went his own impetuous way. He stayed at the university until he
had taught himself French and Italian, as well as German, and had
read all the best literature in those languages. And likewise he
heard all the best music, and went about full of it day and night.
By this time he had definitely beaten his devils, and had come to be
master of himself; and though nobody guessed anything about it,
there was a new marvel going on within him--he had, in a spiritual
sense, become pregnant.

There were many signs by which this state might have been known. He
went quite alone, and spoke to no man; he was self-absorbed, and
walked about with his eyes fixed on vacancy; he was savage when
disturbed, and guarded his time unscrupulously. He had given up the
very last of the formalities of life--he no longer attended any
lectures, or wore cuffs, and he would not talk at meal-times. He
took long walks at impossible hours, and he was fond of a certain
high hill where the storms blew. These things had been going on for
a year; and now the book that had been coming to ripeness in his
mind was ready to be born.

It had its origin in the reading of history, and the fronting of old
tyranny in its cruel forms. Thyrsis had come to hate Christianity
for many things by that time, but most of all he hated it because it
taught the bastard virtue of Obedience. Thyrsis obeyed no man--he
lived his life; and the fiery ardor with which he lived it was
taking form in his mind as a personality. He was dreaming a hero who
should be _Resistance_ incarnate; the passionate assertion of man's
right and of man's defiance.

It was in the days of ferocity in Italy, the days of the despot and
the bravo; and Thyrsis' hero was a minstrel, a mighty musician whose
soul was free. And he sung in the despot's hall, and wooed the
despot's daughter. This was the minstrel of "Zulieka"---

   "His ladder of song was slight,
    But it reached to her window's height;
    Each verse so frail was the silken rail,
    From which her soul took flight."

Thyrsis went about quite drunk with the burning words with which the
minstrel won the lady, and tore her free from the mockeries of
convention, and that divinity that doth hedge about a princess. He
bore her away, locked tightly in his arms, and all his own--into the
great lonely mountains; and there lived the minstrel and the
princess, the lord and the lady of an outlaw band. But the outlaws
were cruel, and the minstrel sought goodness; and so there was a
struggle, and he and the lady went yet deeper into the black forest,
where they dwelt alone in a hut, he a prince of hunters and she a
princess of love. But the outlaws led the despot to the place, and
there was a battle; the princess was slain, and the minstrel escaped
in the darkness. All night he roamed the forest, and in the morning
he lay by the roadside with a bow in his hand, and when the despot
rode by he rose and drove the shaft through his heart. Then they
captured him, and tortured him, and he died with a song of mockery
and defiance upon his lips.

Section 16. Now, when these things first came to Thyrsis, he
whispered in awe that it would be a life-time before he could write
them. And a year passed thus, while every emotion of his life poured
itself into some part of that story, and every note of music that he
heard came out of the minstrel's heart. At last the time came when
he was so full of it that he could no longer find peace; when the
wonder of it was such that he walked along the street laughing, and
with tears in his eyes. Then he said to himself, "It must be done!
Now! Now!" And he looked about him as a woman might, seeking some
place for her labor.

That was in the late winter, when the professors at the university,
and all his relatives and acquaintances, had given him up as a
hopeless case. He had stopped all his writing for money--he had a
hundred dollars laid by, and that would suffice him; and he was
wandering about whispering to himself: "The spring-time! The
spring-time! For it must be in the country!" When April had come he
could stand it no longer--he must go! So he left all behind him, and
set out for a place in the wilderness.

When he reached it, he found a lake that was all ice, and mountains
that were all snow; the country people, who had never seen a poet,
and knew not the subtle difference between inspiration and insanity,
heard with wonder that he was going out into the woods. But he set
out alone, through the snowy forest and along the lake-shore, to
find some place far away, where he could build a hut, or even put up
a tent; and when he was miles from the village, he came suddenly on
a little wonderland that made his heart leap like the wild deer in
the brake. Here was a dreamland palace, a vision beyond all
thinking--a little shanty built of logs! It stood in a pretty dell,
with a mountain streamlet dashing through it, and the mighty forest
hiding it, and the lake spread out in front of it. It was all wet
snow, and freezing rain, and mud and desolation; but Thyrsis saw the
summer that was to be, and he sat down upon a stone and gazed at it,
and laughed and sang for wonder and joy.

Then he fled back to the village, and found the owner of the earthly
rights to this paradise, and hired it for a little gold; and then he
moved out, in spite of the snow. At last his soul was free!

Twice a week they brought him provisions, and there he stayed. At
first he nearly froze at night, and he had to write with his gloves
on; but he did not feel the cold, because of the fire within. He
climbed the mountains and yelled with the mad wind, and tramped
through the bare, rocking forest, singing his minstrel songs. And
all these days he walked with God, and there was no world at all
save the world of nature. Millions of young-hearted things sprang up
out of the ground to welcome him; the forests shook out their
dazzling sheen, and the wild birds went mad in the mornings. All the
time Thyrsis was writing, writing--thrilling with his ecstasy, and
pouring out all his soul. He kept a little diary these days, and for
weeks there was but one entry--"The book! The book!"

And then one day came a letter from his mother, saying that she was
coming to the village nearby to spend the summer; also that
Corydon's mother was coming, and that Corydon would be with her!






BOOK II

THE SNARE





_The streamlet tinkled on. She sat, gazing about her at each
familiar tree and rock. And meanwhile he was reading again from the
book--

   "Here, too, our shepherd-pipes we first assay'd!"

"Is that from 'Thyrsis'?" she asked. "Read me those lines that we
used, to love so much."

And so he turned the page, and read again--

   "A fugitive and gracious light he seeks,
      Shy to illumine; and I seek it, too.
        This does not come with houses or with gold,
      With place, with honor, and a flattering crew:
       'Tis not in the world's market bought and sold--
            But the smooth-slipping weeks
    Drop by, and leave its seeker still untired;
      Out of the heed of mortals he is gone,
      He wends unfollow'd, he must house alone;
    Yet on he fares, by his own heart inspired."_

Section 1. On the train Corydon was writing a letter to a friend, to
say where she was going, and that Thyrsis was there. "I don't expect
to see anything of him," she wrote. "He grows more egotistical and
more contemptuous every day, and I cordially dislike him."

But when a man has spent three or four weeks with no company save
the squirrels and the owls, there comes over him a mood of
sociability, when the sight of a friendly face is an event. Thyrsis
had now written several chapters of his book, and the first fury of
his creative impulse had spent itself. So when Corydon stepped from
the train, she found him waiting there to greet her; and he told her
that he was laying in supplies for a feast, and that on the morrow
she and her mother were to come out and see his fairy-palace and
have a picnic dinner.

They came; and the May put on her finest raiment for their greeting.
The sun shone warm and bright, and there was a humming and stirring
in grass and thicket; one could feel the surge of the spring-time
growth as a living flood. There was a glory of young green over the
hill-sides, and a quivering sheen of white in the aspens and
birches. Corydon clasped her hands and cried out in rapture when she
saw it.

And Thyrsis, picturesque in his old corduroy trousers and his grey
flannel shirt, played the host. He showed them his domestic
establishment--wherein things were set in order for the first time
since he had come. He told all his adventures: how the cold had
crept in at night, and he had to fiddle to keep his courage up; how
he had slept in a canvas-cot for the first time, and piled all the
bedding on top, and wondered that he was cold; how he had left the
pail with the freshly-roasted beef on the piazza, and a wild cat had
carried off pail and all. He made fun of his amateur house-keeping--
he would forget things and let them burn, or let the fire go out;
and he had tried living altogether on cold food, to the great
perplexity of his stomach.

Then he gave a demonstration of his hard-won culinary skill. He
boiled rice and raisins, and fried bacon and eggs; and they had
fresh bread and butter, and jam and pickles, and a festive cake. And
after they had feasted, Thyrsis stretched himself and leaned back
against the trunk of a tree, and gazed up at the sky, quoting the
words of a certain one-eyed Kalandar, son of a king, "Verily, this
indeed is life! 'Tis pity 'tis fleeting!"

Afterwards he took Corydon for a walk. They climbed the hill where
he came to battle with the stormwinds, and to watch the sunsets and
the moon rising over the lake. And then they went down into the
glen, where the mountain streamlet tumbled. Here had been
wood-sorrel, and a carpet of the white trillium; and now there was
adder's tongue, quaint and saucy, and columbine, and the pale dusty
corydalis. There was soft new moss underfoot, and one walked as if
in a temple.

Thyrsis pointed out a seat beside a deep bubbling pool. "Here's
where I sit and write," he said.

"And how comes the book?" asked Corydon.

"Oh, I'm hammering at it--that's the best I can say."

"What is it?"

"Why--it's a story. I suppose it'll be called a romance, though I
don't like the word."

Corydon pondered for a moment. "I wouldn't expect you to be writing
anything romantic," she said.

Thyrsis, occupied with his own thoughts, observed, "I might call it
a revolutionary romance."

"What is it about?"

He hesitated. "It happens in the middle ages," he said. "There's a
minstrel and a princess."

"That sounds interesting," said Corydon.

Now in the period of pregnancy the artist's mood is one of
secretiveness. But afterwards there comes a time for promulgation
and rejoicing; and already there had been hints of this in the mind
of Thyrsis. The great secret that he was cherishing--what would be
the world's reception of it? And now suddenly a wild idea came to
him. He had heard somewhere that it is the women who read fiction.
And was not Corydon a perfect specimen of the average middle-class
young lady, and therefore of that mysterious potentiality, "the
public", to which he must appeal? Why not see what she would think
of it?

He took the plunge. "Would you like me to read it to you?" he asked.

"Why, certainly," she replied, and then added, gently, "If it
wouldn't be a desecration."

"Oh, no," said Thyrsis. "You see, when it's been printed, all sorts
of people will read it."

So he went back to the house and brought the precious manuscript;
and he placed Corydon in the seat of inspiration, and sat beside her
and read.

In many ways this was a revolutionary romance. Thyrsis had not spent
any of his time delving into other people's books for "local color";
he was not relying for his effects upon gabardines and hauberks, and
a sprinkling of "Yea, sires," and "prithees." His castle was but the
vaguely outlined background of a stage upon which living hearts
wrought out their passions. One saw the banquet-hall, with its
tapestries and splendor, and the master of it, the man of force;
there were swift scenes that gave one a glimpse of the age-long
state of things--

   "Right forever on the scaffold,
    Wrong forever on the throne."

There was a quarrel, and a cruel sentence about to be executed; and
then the minstrel came. His fame had come before him, and so the
despot, in half-drunken playfulness, left the deciding of the
quarrel to him. He was brought to the head of the table, and the
princess was led in; and so these two met face to face.

Here Thyrsis paused, and asked, "Are you interested?"

"Go on, go on," said Corydon.

So he read about his princess, who was the embodiment of all the
virtues of the unknown goddess of his fancy. She was proud yet
humble, aloof yet compassionate, and above all ineffably beautiful.
And as for the minstrel--

   "The minstrel was fair and young.
    His heart was of love and fire."

He took his harp, and first he pacified the quarrel, and then he
sang to the lady. He sang of love, and the poet's vision of beauty;
but most of all he sang of the free life of the open. He sang of the
dreams and the spirit-companions of the minstrel, and of the
wondrous magic that he wields--

   "Secrets of all future ages
      Hover in mine ecstasy;
    Treasures never known to mortals
      Hath my fancy hid for thee!"

He sang the spells that he would weave for her, the far journeys she
should take--

   "For thy soul a river flowing
      Swiftly, over golden sands,
    With the singing of the steersman
      Stealing into wonderlands!"

Section 2. This song was as far as Thyrsis had written, and he
paused. Corydon was sitting with her hands clasped, and a look of
enthrallment upon her face. "Oh, beautiful! beautiful!" she cried.

A thrill of pleasure went through the poet. "You like it, then?" he
said.

"Oh, I like it!" she answered. And then she gazed at him, with
wide-open eyes of amazement. "But you! You!" she exclaimed.

"Why not I?" he asked.

"How in the world did you do it? Where did you get it from?"

"It is mine," said Thyrsis, quickly.

"But I can't imagine it! I had no idea you were interested in such
things!"

"But how could you know what I am interested in?"

"I see how you live--apart from everybody. And you spend all your
time in books!"

Thyrsis suddenly recollected something which had amused him very
much. Corydon had been reading "Middlemarch," and had told him that
Dr. Casaubon reminded her of him. "And so I'm still just a bookworm
to you!" he laughed.

"But isn't your interest in things always intellectual?" she asked.

"Then you suppose I'm doing this just as an exercise in technique?"
he countered.

"It's taken me quite by surprise," said Corydon.

"We have three faculties in us," Thyrsis propounded--"intellect,
feeling, and will; and to be a complete human being, we have to
develop all of them."

"But you spend so much time piling up learning!"

"I need to know a great many things," he said. "I'm not conscious of
studying anything I don't need for my purpose."

"What is the purpose?" she asked.

He touched the precious manuscript. "This," he said.

There was a pause.

"But you lose so much when you cut yourself off from the world,"
said Corydon. "And there are other people, whom you might help."

"People don't need my help; or at least, they don't want it."

"But how can you know that--if you never go among them?"

"I can judge by the lives they live."

"Ah!" exclaimed Corydon, quickly, "but people aren't to blame for
the lives they live!"

"Why not?" he asked.

"Because--they can't help them. They are bound fast."

"They should break loose."

"That is easy for you to say," said Corydon. "You have no ties."

"I did have them--I might have them still. But I broke them."

"Ah, but you are a man!"

"What difference does that make?"

"It makes all the difference in the world. You can earn money, you
can go away by yourself. But suppose you were a girl--shut up in a
home, and told that that was your 'sphere'?"

"I'd fight," said Thyrsis--"I'd break my way out somehow, never
fear. If one doesn't break out, it simply means that his desire is
not strong enough."

Thyrsis had been surprised at the depth of Corydon's interest in his
manuscript; he had not supposed that she would be so susceptible to
anything of the imagination. And now he was surprised to see that
her hands were clenched tightly, and that she sat staring ahead of
her intently.

"Are you dissatisfied with your life?" he asked.

"Is there anything in it that I could be satisfied with?" she cried.

"I had no idea of that," he said.

"No," she replied; "that only shows how stupid you can be!"

"But--you never showed any signs--"

"Didn't you know that I was trying to prepare for college last
year?"

"Yes; but you gave it up."

"What could I do? I had no help--no encouragement. I was groping
like a blind person. And I told you about it."

"But I told you what to study," objected Thyrsis.

"Yes," said the girl; "but how could I do it? You know how to
study--you've been taught. But I don't know anything, and I don't
know how to find anything out. I began on the Latin, but I didn't
even know how the words should be pronounced."

"Nobody else knows that," observed Thyrsis, somewhat inconsequently.

"It was all so dull and dreary," she went on--"everything they would
have had me learn. I wanted things that had life in them, things
that were beautiful and worth while--like this book of yours, for
instance."

"I am really delighted that you like it," said Thyrsis, touched by
that.

"Tell me the rest of it," she said.

Section 3. Thyrsis told his story at some length; in the ardor of
her sympathy his imagination took fire, and he told it eloquently,
he discovered new beauties in it that he had not seen before. And
Corydon listened with growing delight and amazement.

"So that is the way you spend your time!" she exclaimed.

"That is the way," he said.

"And that is why you live like a hermit!"

"Yes, that is why."

"And you think that you would lose your vision if you went among
people?"

"I know that I should."

"But how do you know?"

"I know because I have tried. You don't realize how hard I have to
work over a thing like this. I have carried it in my mind for a
year; I have lived for nothing else--I have literally had no other
interest in the world. Every sentence I have read to you has been
the product of work added to work--of one impulse piled upon
another--of thinking and criticizing and revising. Just the little
bit I have done has taken me a whole month, and I have hardly
stopped to eat; it's been my first thought in the morning and my
last at night. And when the mood of it comes to me, then I work in a
kind of frenzy that lasts for hours and even days; and if I give up
in the middle and fall back, then I have to do it all over again.
It's like toiling up a mountain-side."

"I see," whispered Corydon. "And then, do you expect to have no
human relationships as long as you live?"

Thyrsis pondered for a moment. "Did you ever read Mrs. Browning's
poem, 'A Musical Instrument'?" he asked.

"No," she answered.

"It's a most beautiful poem," he said; "and it's hardly ever quoted
or read, that I can find. It tells how the great god Pan came down
by the river-bank, and cut one of the reeds to make himself a pipe.
He sat there and played his music upon it--

   'Sweet, sweet, sweet, O Pan!
      Piercing sweet by the river!
    Blinding sweet, O great god Pan!
    The sun on the hill forgot to die,
    And the lilies reviv'd, and the dragon-fly
      Came back to dream on the river.

   'Yet half a beast is the great god Pan,
      To laugh as he sits by the river,
    Making a poet out of a man.
    The true gods sigh for the cost and pain,--
    For the reed which grows nevermore again
      As a reed with the reeds in the river.'"

Thyrsis paused. "Do you see what it means?" he asked.

"Yes," said Corydon, "I see."

"'Making a poet out of a man!' That is one of the finest lines I
know. And that's the way I feel about it--I have given up all other
duties in the world. If I can write one book, or even one poem, that
will be an inspiration to men in the future--why, then I have done
far more than I could do by a lifetime given to helping people
around me."

"I never understood before," said Corydon.

"That is the idea the minstrel tries to voice to the princess. At
first he pours out his soul to her; but then, when he finds that she
loves him, he is afraid, and tries to persuade her not to come with
him. He tells her how lonely and stern his life is; and she has been
born to a gentle life--she has her station and her duty in the
world. But the more he pleads the hardness of his life, the more she
sees she must go with him. Even if the end be death to her, still
she will be an inspiration to him, and give wings to his music. 'Be
silent,' she tells him--'let me fling myself away for a song! To do
one deed that the world remembers, to utter one word that lives
forever--that is worth all the failure and the agony that can come
to one woman in her lifetime!'"

Corydon sat with her hands clasped. "Yes," she said, "that is the
way she would feel!"

"I'm glad to hear you say that," remarked the other. "I must make it
real; and I've been afraid about it. Would she really go with him?"

"She would go if she loved him," said Corydon.

"If she loved him. But she must love his art still more."

"She must love _him,"_ said Corydon.

Thyrsis shook his head. "It would not do for her to go with him for
that," he said.

"Why not? Doesn't he love her?"

"Yes; but he is afraid to tell her so. They dare not let that sway
them."

"I don't understand. Why not?"

"Because personal love is a limited thing, and comparatively an
ignoble thing."

"I don't see how there can be anything more noble than true love
between a man and a woman," declared Corydon.

"It depends on what you mean by 'true' love," replied Thyrsis. "If
two people love each other for their own sakes, and go together,
they soon come to know each other, and then they are satisfied--and
their growth is at an end. What I conceive is that two people must
lose themselves, and all thought of themselves, in their common love
for something higher--for some great ideal, some purpose, some
vision of perfection. And they seek this together, and they rejoice
in finding it, each for the other; and so they have always progress
and growth--they stand for something new to each other every day of
their lives. To such love there is no end, and no chance of
weariness or satiety."

"I had never thought of it just so," said the girl. "But surely
there must be a personal love in the beginning."

"I don't know," he responded. "I hadn't thought about that. I'm
afraid I'm impersonal by nature."

"Yes," she said, "that's what has puzzled me. Don't you love human
beings?"

"Not as a rule," he confessed.

"But then--what is it you are interested in? Yourself?"

"People tell me that's the case. And there's a sense in which it's
true--I'm wrapped up in the thought of myself as an art-work. I've a
certain vision of the possibilities of my own being, and I'm trying
to realize it. And if I do, then I can write books and communicate
it to other people, so that they can judge it, and see if it's any
better than the vision they have. It is a higher kind of
unselfishness, I think."

"I see," said Corydon. "It's not easy to understand."

"No one understands it," he replied. "People are taught that they
must sacrifice themselves for others; and they do it, blindly and
stupidly, and never ask if the other person is worthy of the
sacrifice--and still less if they themselves have anything worth
sacrificing."

Corydon had clenched her hands suddenly. "How I hate the religion of
self-sacrifice!" she cried.

"Mine is a religion of self-development," said Thyrsis. "I am
sacrificing myself for what other people ought to be."

Section 4. They came back after a time, to the subject of love; and
to the ideal of it which Thyrsis meant to set forth in the book. It
was the duty of every soul to seek the highest potentiality of which
it had vision; and as one did that for himself, so he did it for the
person he loved. There could be no higher love than this--to treat
the thing beloved as one's self, to be perpetually dissatisfied with
it, to scourge it to new endeavor, to hold it in immortal
discontent.

This was a point about which they argued with eager excitement. To
Thyrsis, love itself was a prize to be held before the loved one;
whereas Corydon argued that love must exist before such a union
could be thought of. Her cheeks flushed and her eyes shone as she
maintained the thesis that the princess could not go with the
minstrel unless his love was given to her irrevocably.

"If you mean by love a sense of oneness in the pursuit of an ideal,
then I agree with you," said Thyrsis. "But if you mean what love
generally means--a mutual admiration, the worshipping of another
personality--then I don't."

"And are lovers not even to be interesting to each other?" cried
Corydon.

But the poet did not shrink even from that. "I don't think a woman
could be interesting to me--except in so far as she was growing. And
she must always know that if she stopped growing, she would cease to
be interesting. That is not a matter of anybody's will, it seems to
me--it is a fact of soul-chemistry."

"I don't think you will find many women to love you on that basis,"
said Corydon.

"I never expected to find but one," was Thyrsis' reply; "and I may
not find even one."

She sat watching him for a moment. "I had never realized the
sublimity of your egotism," she said. "It would never occur to you
to judge anyone else by your own standards, would it?"

"That is very well put," laughed Thyrsis. "As a matter of fact, I
have a maxim that I count all things lost in the world but my own
soul."

"Why is that?"

"Because I can depend on my own soul; and I have not yet met
anything else in life of which I can say that."

Again there was a pause. "You are as hard as iron!" exclaimed the
girl.

"I am harder than anything you can find for your simile," he
answered. "I know simply that there is no force existing that can
turn me from my task."

"You might meet some woman who would fascinate you."

"Perhaps," he replied. "I have done things I'm ashamed of, and I've
a wholesome fear of doing more of them. But I know that that woman,
whoever she might be, would wake up some morning and find me
missing."

Then for a while he sat staring at the eddies in the pool below. "I
have a vision of another kind of woman," he said--"a woman to whom
my ideal would be the same compelling force that it is to me--a
living thing that would drive her, that she was both master of, and
slave to, as I am. So that she would feel no fears, and ask no
favors! So that she would not want mercy, nor ask pledges--but just
give herself, as I give myself, and take the chances of the game.
Don't you think there may be just one such woman in the world?"

"Perhaps," was the reply. "But then--mightn't a woman be sure of
your ideal, but not of you?"

"As to that," said Thyrsis, "she would have to know me.

"As to that," said Corydon, "she would have to love you."

And Thyrsis smiled. "As in most arguments," he said, "it's mainly a
matter of definitions."

Section 5. At this point there came a call from the distance, and
Corydon started. "There is mother," she exclaimed. "How the
afternoon has flown!"

"And must you go home now?" he asked.

"I'm afraid so," she replied. "We have a long row."

"I'm sorry," he said. "I wanted to advise you about books to read.
You must let me help you to find what you are seeking."

"Ah," said Corydon, "if you only will!"

"I will do anything I can," he said. "I am ashamed of not having
helped you before."

They had risen and started towards the house. "Can't you come
to-morrow, and we can talk it over," he said.

"But I thought you were going to work," she objected.

"I can spare another day," he replied. "A rest won't hurt me, I
know. And it's been a real pleasure to talk to you this afternoon."

So they settled it; and Thyrsis saw them off in the boat, and then
he went back to the little cabin.

On the steps he stood still. "Corydon!" he muttered. "Little
Corydon!"

That was always the way he thought of her; not only because he had
known her when she was a child, but because this expressed his
conception of her--she was so gentle and peaceable and meek. She was
now eighteen, and he was only twenty, but he felt towards her as a
grandfather might. But now had come this new revelation, that
astonished him. She had been deeply stirred by his work--she had
loved it; and this was no affectation, it was out of her inmost
heart. And she was not really contented at all--she had quite a
hunger for life in her!

It had been like an explosion; the barriers had been destroyed
between them, and he saw her as she really was. And he could hardly
believe it--all through the adventures that followed he would find
himself standing in the same kind of daze, whispering to himself--
"Corydon! Little Corydon!"

He did not try to do any work that evening. He thought about her,
and the problem of her life. She had stirred him strangely; he saw
her beautiful with a new kind of beauty. He resolved that he would
put her upon the way to some of the joy she sought.

She came early the next morning, and they sat by the lake-shore and
talked. They talked about the things she needed to study, and how
she should study them; about the books she had read and the books
she was to read next. And from this they went on to a hundred
questions of literature and philosophy and life. They became eager
and excited; their thoughts took wings, and they lost all sense of
time and place. There were so many things to be discussed!

Corydon, in spite of all her anti-clericalism, believed in
immortality; she laid claim to intuitions and illuminations
concerning it. And to Thyrsis, on the other hand, the idea of
immortality was the consummation of all unfaith. To him life was a
bubble upon the stream of time, a shadow of clouds upon the
mountains; there was nothing about it that could be or should be
immortal.

"The act of faith," he cried, "is to give ourselves into the arms of
life, to take it as it comes, to rejoice in its infinite unfoldment,
the 'plastic dance of circumstance'; to behold the budding flower
and the new-born suns as equal expressions of the joy of becoming.
But people are weak, they love themselves, and they set themselves
up as the centre of existence!"

But Corydon was personal, and loved life; and she stood out that
death was unthinkable--that she had the sense of infinity within
her. Thyrsis strove to make her see that one was to wreak one's
hunger for infinity at each moment, and not put it off to any future
age; that life was a thing for itself, and needed no sequel to
justify it. "It is a free gift, and we have no claim upon it; we
must take it on the terms of the giver."

From that they came to religion. Thyrsis loved the forms of the old
faiths, because of the poetry there was in them; and so he wrestled
with Corydon's paganism. He tried to show her how one could read
"Paradise Lost" and the English prayer-book, precisely as one read
Virgil and Homer; to which Corydon answered that she had been to
Sunday-school.