late, too early, or too far away from the haunts of her spirit ever to

harmonize with the unbeautiful things of contemporary reality? To dispel

the mood which was engulfing her more and more deeply each moment, she

took a magazine from the table and searched for some healing bit of

poetry. Poetry had always relieved her troubled mind better than anything

else, though many things in the poetry she had seen detracted from the

influence. Over parts of even the sublimest verses hung a chill vapor of

sterile ugliness and restraint, like dust on a window-pane through which

one views a magnificent sunset.

Listlessly turning the magazine's pages, as if searching for an elusive

treasure, she suddenly came upon something which dispelled her languor. An

observer could have read her thoughts and told that she had discovered

some image or dream which brought her nearer to her unattained goal than

any image or dream she had seen before. It was only a bit of vers libre,

that pitiful compromise of the poet who overleaps prose yet falls short of

the divine melody of numbers; but it had in it all the unstudied music of

a bard who lives and feels, who gropes ecstatically for unveiled beauty.

Devoid of regularity, it yet had the harmony of winged, spontaneous words,

a harmony missing from the formal, convention-bound verse she had known.

As she read on, her surroundings gradually faded, and soon there lay about

her only the mists of dream, the purple, star-strewn mists beyond time,

where only Gods and dreamers walk.