I have not that germ. I destroyed it four years ago. Reading the
dedications of poets cured me of the love for poetry. What a pity that
the Divine Inspiration should have for its oracles such mean souls!"

"Yes, and how industrious the good gentlemen are in debasing themselves!
Their ingenuity is never half so much shown in a simile as in a
compliment; I know nothing in nature more melancholy than the discovery
of any meanness in a great man. There is so little to redeem the dry
mass of follies and errors from which the materials of this life are
composed, that anything to love or to reverence becomes, as it were, the
sabbath for the mind. It is better to feel, as we grow older, how the
respite is abridged, and how the few objects left to our admiration are
abased. What a foe not only to life, but to all that dignifies and
ennobles it, is Time! Our affections and our pleasures resemble those
fabulous trees described by Saint Oderic: the fruits which they bring
forth are no sooner ripened into maturity than they are transformed into
birds and fly away. But these reflections cannot yet be familiar to
you. Let us return to Cowley. Do you feel any sympathy with his prose
writings? For some minds they have a great attraction."

"They have for mine," answered I: "but then I am naturally a dreamer;
and a contemplative egotist is always to me a mirror in which I behold
myself."

"The world," answered St. John, with a melancholy smile, "will soon
dissolve, or forever confirm, your humour for dreaming; in either case,
Cowley will not be less a favourite. But you must, like me, have long
toiled in the heat and travail of business, or of pleasure, which is
more wearisome still, in order fully to sympathize with those beautiful
panegyrics upon solitude which make perhaps the finest passages in