"'Then wherefore,' I interrupted, 'do I see Robert Burns loitering with that lady in a ruff,--Cassandra, I make no doubt--Ronsard's Cassandra? And why is the incomparable Clarinda inseparable from Petrarch; and Miss Patty Blount, Pope's flame, from the Syrian Meleager, while HIS Heliodore is manifestly devoted to Mr. Emerson, whom, by the way, I am delighted, if rather surprised, to see here?'
"'Ah,' said Catullus, 'you are a new-comer among us. Poets will be poets, and no sooner have they attained their desire, and dwelt in the company of their earthly Ideals, than they feel strangely, yet irresistibly drawn to Another. So it was in life, so it will ever be. No Ideal can survive a daily companionship, and fortunate is the poet who did not marry his first love!'
"'As far as that goes,' I answered, 'most of you were highly favoured; indeed, I do not remember any poet whose Ideal was his wife, or whose first love led him to the altar.'
"'I was not a marrying man myself,' answered the Veronese; 'few of us were. Myself, Horace, Virgil--we were all bachelors.'
"'And Lesbia!'
"I said this in a low voice, for Laura was weaving bay into a chaplet, and inattentive to our conversation.
"'Poor Lesbia!' said Catullus, with a suppressed sigh. 'How Imisjudged that girl! How cruel, how causeless were my reproaches,'
and wildly rending his curled locks and laurel crown, he fled into a thicket, whence there soon arose the melancholy notes of the Ausonian lyre.'
"'He is incorrigible,' said Laura, very coldly; and she deliberately began to tear and toss away the fragments of the chaplet she had been weaving. 'I shall never break him of that habit of versifying. But they are all alike.'
"'Is there nobody here,' said I, 'who is happy with his Ideal--nobody but has exchanged Ideals with some other poet?'
"'There is one,' she said. 'He comes of a northern tribe; and in his life-time he never rhymed upon his unattainable lady, or if rhyme he did, the accents never carried her name to the ears of the vulgar. Look there.'
"She pointed to the river at our feet, and I knew the mounted figure that was riding the ford, with a green-mantled lady beside him like the Fairy Queen.
"Surely I had read of her, and knew her -"'She whose blue eyes their secret told, Though shaded by her locks of gold.'
"'They are different; I know not why. They are constant,' said Laura, and rising with an air of chagrin, she disappeared among the boughs of the trees that bear her name.
"'Unhappy hearts of poets,' I mused. 'Light things and sacred they are, but even in their Paradise, and among their chosen, with every wish fulfilled, and united to their beloved, they cannot be at rest!'
"Thus moralising, I wended my way to a crag, whence there was a wide prospect. Certain poets were standing there, looking down into an abyss, and to them I joined myself.
"'Ah, I cannot bear it!' said a voice, and, as he turned away, his brow already clearing, his pain already forgotten, I beheld the august form of Shakespeare.
"Marking my curiosity before it was expressed, he answered the unuttered question.
"'That is a sight for Pagans,' he said, 'and may give them pleasure. But my Paradise were embittered if I had to watch the sorrows of others, and their torments, however well deserved. The others are gazing on the purgatory of critics and commentators.'
"He passed from me, and I joined the 'Ionian father of the rest'--Homer, who, with a countenance of unspeakable majesty, was seated on a throne of rock, between the Mantuan Virgil of the laurel crown, Hugo, Sophocles, Milton, Lovelace, Tennyson, and Shelley.
"At their feet I beheld, in a vast and gloomy hall, many an honest critic, many an erudite commentator, an army of reviewers. Some were condemned to roll logs up insuperable heights, whence they descended thundering to the plain. Others were set to impositions, and I particularly observed that the Homeric commentators were obliged to write out the "Iliad" and "Odyssey" in their complete shape, and were always driven by fiends to the task when they prayed for the bare charity of being permitted to leave out the 'interpolations.' Others, fearful to narrate, were torn into as many fragments as they had made of these immortal epics. Others, such as Aristarchus, were spitted on their own critical signs of disapproval. Many reviewers were compelled to read the books which they had criticised without perusal, and it was terrible to watch the agonies of the worthy pressmen who were set to this unwonted task. 'May we not be let off with the preface?' they cried in piteous accents. 'May we not glance at the table of contents and be done with it?' But the presiding demons (who had been Examiners in the bodily life) drove them remorseless to their toils.
"Among the condemned I could not but witness, with sympathy, the punishment reserved for translators. The translators of Virgil, in particular, were a vast and motley assemblage of most respectable men. Bishops were there, from Gawain Douglas downwards; Judges, in their ermine; professors, clergymen, civil servants, writhing in all the tortures that the blank verse, the anapaestic measure, the metre of the "Lay of the Last Minstrel," the heroic couplet and similar devices can inflict. For all these men had loved Virgil, though not wisely: and now their penance was to hear each other read their own translations.""That must have been more than they could bear," said Lady Violet "Yes," said Mr. Witham; "I should know, for down I fell into Tartarus with a crash, and writhed among the Translators.""Why?" asked Lady Violet.
"Because I have translated Theocritus!"
"Mr. Witham," said Lady Violet, "did you meet your ideal woman when you were in the Paradise of Poets?""She yet walks this earth," said the bard, with a too significant bow.
Lady Violet turned coldly away.
* * *
Mr. Witham was never invited to the Blues again--the name of Lord Azure's place in Kent.
The Poet is shut out of Paradise.