Hist. Do you know how History is written? For the process of discrimination to have value it is essential to let the tangle of wheat and tares grow up together. For the exhibition of the sequence of cause and effect it is essential to destroy no link in the chain which, however base its material, no doubt leads somewhither. Absolute stagnation of mind would reward your well-meant efforts; you would fain gaze at your own reflection in a duck-pond thick with borrowed fancies, because you cannot make a hand-glass of the sea. But Time unrolls itself, and some day we shall understand the script, if we are careful to save the disclosed part.
Poet. Time will wear out and drop off in rags, or be blown away like a morning mist, and Space will be shrivelled up like burnt paper before you understand three words of the script. You try to read the world precisely as Mr. Ignatius Donnelly tries to read Shakespeare. There is the beauty and wonder of the thing plain before your eyes, and you insist on a hidden and portentously trivial meaning. I suppose it is "progress" you are looking for. Progress is economic, mechanical, a matter of bells and buttons and hooks, of methods of election and painless executions; it has nothing to do with the eternal subject-matter of the artist, and you, if you are not an artist, are nothing. I believe, nevertheless, that there are persons who can stand on a mountaintop and talk of progress. In fact, I have met them. They understood diet, which made me think that when a man says "progress," it is the stomach speaks. Your case, of course, is different.
Hist. Pray diagnose my case.
Poet. You are tied to Time and you have to explain it. Time seems to me a kind of monstrous mastodon who ravages the jungle devouring all he sees. Now you have constituted yourselfhis
