As to your verses,
pray read them to your contemporaries. Your names are as strange to
me as your faces; and even were it otherwise,--let me whisper you a
secret,--the cold, icy memory which one generation may retain of
another is but a poor recompense to barter life for. Yet, if your
heart is set on being known to me, the surest, the only method is,
to live truly and wisely for your own age, whereby, if the native
force be in you, you may likewise live for posterity."
"It is nonsense," murmured the Oldest Inhabitant, who, as a man of
the past, felt jealous that all notice should be withdrawn from
himself to be lavished on the future, "sheer nonsense, to waste so
much thought on what only is to be."
To divert the minds of his guests, who were considerably abashed by
this little incident, the Man of Fancy led them through several
apartments of the castle, receiving their compliments upon the taste
and varied magnificence that were displayed in each. One of these
rooms was filled with moonlight, which did not enter through the
window, but was the aggregate of all the moonshine that is scattered
around the earth on a summer night while no eyes are awake to enjoy
its beauty. Airy spirits had gathered it up, wherever they found it
gleaming on the broad bosom of a lake, or silvering the meanders of
a stream, or glimmering among the windstirred boughs of a wood, and
had garnered it in this one spacious hall. Along the walls,
illuminated by the mild intensity of the moonshine, stood a
multitude of ideal statues, the original conceptions of the great
works of ancient or modern art, which the sculptors did but
imperfectly succeed in putting into marble; for it is not to be
supposed that the pure idea of an immortal creation ceases to exist;
it is only necessary to know where they are deposited in order to
obtain possession of them.
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