aron. His
college career, so far from indicating his future life, exactly reverses
it: he is brought up in one course in order to proceed in another. And
this I hold to be the universal error of education in all countries;
they conceive it a certain something to be finished at a certain age.
They do not make it a part of the continuous history of life, but a
wandering from it."

"You have been in England?" asked Vane.

"Yes; I have travelled over nearly the whole of it on foot. I was poor
at that time, and imagining there was a sort of masonry between all men
of letters, I inquired at each town for the _savants_, and asked money
of them as a matter of course."

Vane almost laughed outright at the simplicity and naive unconsciousness
of degradation with which the student proclaimed himself a public
beggar.

"And how did you generally succeed?"

"In most cases I was threatened with the stocks, and twice I was
consigned by the _juge de paix_ to the village police, to be passed
to some mystic Mecca they were pleased to entitle 'a parish.' Ah"
(continued the German with much _bonhomie_), "it was a pity to see in a
great nation so much value attached to such a trifle as money. But what
surprised me greatly was the tone of your poetry. Madame de Stael, who
knew perhaps as much of England as she did of Germany, tells us that its
chief character is the _chivalresque_; and, excepting only Scott, who,
by the way, is _not_ English, I did not find one chivalrous poet among
you. Yet," continued the student, "between ourselves, I fancy that in
our present age of civilization, there is an unexamined mistake in the
general mind as to the value of poetry. It delights still as ever, but
it has ceased to teach. The prose of the heart enlightens, touches,
rouses, far more than poetry. Your most philosophical poets would be
commonplace if turned into prose. Verse cannot contain the refining
subtle thoughts which a great prose writer embodies; the rhyme eternally
cripples it; it properly deals with the common problems of human nature,
which are now hackneyed, and not with the nice and philosophizing
corollaries which may be drawn from them. Thus, though it would seem
at first a paradox, commonplace is more the element of poetry than of
prose."

This sentiment charmed Vane, who had nothing of the poet about him;
and he took the student to share their breakfast at the inn, with
a complacency he rarely experienced at the remeeting with a