tutions and scorns the history of their development surely need. not despair.
Poet. The greatest of human institutions is the human heart.
Sufficit una domus."
What if Juvenal be right? The heart remains triangular and the world spherical—to use the language of the older physiologists. If these two be constant in differing, what does your parade of development amount to? Human affairs run not, says Sir Thomas Browne, upon an helix that continually enlargeth, but upon an even circle. You spend you life in travelling laboriously over a small arc of the circumference; I strike for the centre, where Shakespeare and Æschylus sit throned and immovable. And that, I take it, is the difference between us.
Hist. It is the difference between life and death. You remind me of the delusions of the early seekers for the North Pole. When you reach the centre you may learn too late that Shakespeare was an Elizabethan and that Æschylus fought at Marathon. There is neither vegetation nor life in the realm of frozen vapour that you seek. Long ago I noticed with regret that there are not facts in the books you write.
Poet. Nor are there any fossil plants in my garden. When emotions, thoughts, desires, aspirations, regrets, reflections, lose their vitality and are petrified in the stream of History they become facts. I shall be a fact myself one day, and your grandsons, or, at the furthest, your great-grandsons, will have to learn me. They will get prizes for knowing all about me, including the date and place of my birth, which I do not myself remember. It is not live men you care for; your histories remind me of the Morgue, and all you supply is the squirt of cold water.
Hist.
