erican's money can purchase is
exile, and to this rich man doubtless Europe is a twice-told tale. Let us
clap our empty pockets, dearest reader, and be glad.

We can be as glad, apparently, and with the same reason as the poorly
dressed young man standing near beside the guard, whose face Basil and
Isabel chose to fancy that of a poet, and concerning whom, they romanced
that he was going home, wherever his home was, with the manuscript of a
rejected book in his pocket. They imagined him no great things of a poet,
to be sure, but his pensive face claimed delicate feeling for him, and a
graceful, sombre fancy, and they conjectured unconsciously caught flavors
of Tennyson and Browning in his verse, with a moderner tint from Morris:
for was it not a story out of mythology, with gods and heroes of the
nineteenth century, that he was now carrying back from New York with him?
Basil sketched from the colors of his own long-accepted disappointments a
moving little picture of this poor imagined poet's adventures; with what
kindness and unkindness he had been put to shame by publishers, and how,
descending from his high, hopes of a book, he had tried to sell to the
magazines some of the shorter pieces out of the "And other Poems" which
were to have filled up the volume. "He's going back rather stunned and
bewildered; but it's something to have tasted the city, and its bitter
may turn to sweet on his palate, at last, till he finds himself longing
for the tumult that he abhors now. Poor fellow! one compassionate
cut-throat of a publisher even asked him to lunch, being struck, as we
are, with something fine in his face. I hope he's got somebody who
believes in him, at home. Otherwise he'd be more comfortable, for the
present, if he went over the railing there."

So the play of which they were both actors and spectators went on about
them. Like all passages of life, it seemed now a grotesque mystery, with
a bluntly enforced moral, now a farce of the broadest, now a latent
tragedy folded in the disguises of comedy. All the elements, indeed, of
either were at work there, and this was but one brief scene of the
immense complex drama which was to proceed so variously in such different
times and places, and to have its denouement only in eternity. The
contrasts were sharp: each group had its travesty in some other; the talk
of one seemed the rude burlesque, the bitter satire of the next; but of
all these parodies none was so terribly effec