Prose Fancies (Second Series) — Inside the Classic

She had not long to wait outside the door she sought, for the poet, who had listened all day for the sound, had ears for the whisper of her skirts as she came down the corridor, and before she had time to knock had already folded her in his arms. The two babes in that thieves' wood of commission agents and shipbrokers stood silent together for a moment, in the deep security of a kiss such as the richest millionaire could never buy--and then they fell to comparing notes of their day's work. The poet had had one of his rare good days. He had made no money, his post had been even more disappointing than usual,--but he had written a poem, the best he had ever written, he said, as he always said of his last new thing. He had been burning to read it to somebody all afternoon--had with difficulty refrained from reading it to the loquacious little keeper's wife as she brought him some coals--so it was not to be expected that he should wait a minute before reading it to her whom indeed it strove to celebrate. With arms round each other's necks, they bent over the table littered with the new-born poem, all blots and dashes like the first draft of a composer's score, and the poet, deftly picking his way among the erasures and interlineations, read aloud the beautiful words--with a full sense of their beauty!--to ears that deemed them more beautiful even than they were. The owners of this now valuable copyright allow me to irradiate my prose with three of the verses.

'Ah! what,' half-chanted, half-crooned the poet--

'Ah! what a garden is your hair!-- Such treasure as the kings of old, In coffers of the beaten gold, Laid up on earth--and left it there.'

So tender a reference to hair whose beauty others beside the poet had loved must needs make a tender interruption--the only kind of interruption the poet could have forgiven--and 'Who,' he continued--

'Who was the artist of your mouth? What master out of old Japan Wrought it so dangerous to man ...'

And here it was but natural that laughter and kisses should once more interrupt--

'Those strange blue jewels of your eyes, Painting the lily of your face, What goldsmith set them in their place-- Forget-me-nots of Paradise?

'And that blest river of your voice, Whose merry silver stirs the rest Of water-lilies in your breast ...'

At last, in spite of more interruptions, the poem came to an end--whereupon, of course, the poet immediately read it through once more from the beginning, its personal and emotional elements, he felt, having been done more justice on a first reading than its artistic excellences.

'Why, darling, it is splendid,' was his little sweetheart's comment; 'you know how happy it makes me to think it was written for me, don't you?' And she took his hands and looked up at him with eyes like the morning sky.

Romance in poetry is almost exclusively associated with very refined ethereal matters, stars and flowers and such like--happily, in actual life it is often associated with much humbler objects. Lovers, like children, can make their paradises out of the quaintest materials. Indeed, our paradises, if we only knew, are always cheap enough; it is our hells that are so expensive. Now these lovers--like, if I mistake not, many other true lovers before and since--when they were particularly happy, when some special piece of good luck had befallen them, could think of no better paradise than a little dinner together in their seventh-story heaven. 'Ah! wilderness were Paradise enow!'