st a baseness! And bitterly resentful of the young diviner who can
thus show forth her inmost woe with his phrase of "love, _at last aware_
of scorn," she flings the volume from her--rejecting him, detesting him,
and finding ultimately through her stung sense the way to refute him who
has dared, with his mere boy's eyes, to discern such anguish. He is
wrong: the wind does _not_ mean what he fancies by its moaning. He thus
interprets it, because he thinks only of himself, and of how the
suffering of others--failure, mistake, disgrace, relinquishment--is but
the example for his use, the help to his path untried! Such agonies as
her own are mere instances for him to recognise and put into a
phrase--like that one, which stings the spirit, and sets the heart to
woe-fullest aching, and brims the eyes with bitter, bitterest tears. How
dare he, with his crude boy's heart, embody grief like hers in words,
how dare he know--and now her irony turns cruel:

"Oh, he knows what defeat means, and the rest!
Himself the undefeated that shall be:
Failure, disgrace, he flings them you to test--
His triumph in eternity
Too plainly manifest!"

Of course he does not know! The wind means something else. And as the
pain grows fainter, she finds it easier to forgive him. How _could_ "the
happy, prompt instinctive way of youth" discover the wind's secret? Only
"the kind, calm years, exacting their accompt of pain" can mature the
mind. This young poet, grown older, will learn the truth one day--on a
midsummer morning, at daybreak, looking over some "sparkling foreign
country," at its height of gloom and gloss. At its height--next minute
must begin, then, the work of destruction; and what shall be the
earliest sign? That very wind beginning among the vines:

"So low, so low, what shall it say but this?
'Here is the change beginning, here the lines
Circumscribe beauty, set to bliss
The limit time assigns.'" . . .

Change is the law of life: _that_ is what the wind says.

"Nothing can be as it has been before;
Better, so call it, only not the same.
To draw one beauty into our hearts' core,
And keep it changeless! Such our claim;
So answered: Never more!

Simple? Why, this is the old woe of the world;
Tune, to whose rise and fall we live and die.
Rise with it then! Rejoice that man is hurled
From change to change unceasingly,
His