from it.

PRIEST.

Do you not feel, sire, a peculiar sense of flush, of spring-tide--a
direct juvenile ebullience?

ZEUS.

Ah, no doubt, no doubt. And a kind of nostalgia, or harking-back to
happier days, a sense of their rapid passage, and their
irrecoverability. Is that right?

PRIEST.

It is a positive divination!

ZEUS.

I am conscious of the agreeable recollection of an incident----

PRIEST [_with rapture_].

Ah!----

ZEUS.

A little event?----

PRIEST.

You make my heart beat so high, sire, that I can hardly speak.
Deign, sire, to recall that incident.

ZEUS [_with extreme affability_].

It was hardly an incident.... I merely happened, while you were
reciting your song, to remember an occasion on which--on which
Iris, at the rampart of our golden wall, bending back, was caught
by the wind, and--and the contours were delicious.

PRIEST.

Oh! the word, the word!

ZEUS [_with slight hauteur_].

I do not follow you. Her rainbow----

PRIEST.

Ah! yes, sire, the rainbow, the rainbow! O what an art of
incontestable divination!

ZEUS [_much animated_].

But you did not say anything about a rainbow, nor describe one,
nor ever mention the elements of such a bow.

PRIEST.

Ah! no, sire. That is the art of the New Poetry. It names nothing,
it describes nothing. All that it designs to do is to place the
mind of the listener--of the august and perspicacious listener--in
such an attitude as that the unnamed, the undescribed object rises
full in vision. The poet flings forth his melody, and to the gross
ear it seems a mere tinkle of inanity. That is simply because the
crowd who worship at the shrine of the Sminthean Apollo have been
accustomed by an old-fashioned and ridiculously incompetent
priesthood to look for an instant and mechanical relation between
sound and sense. I would not exaggerate, sire; but the kind of
poetry lately cultivated, not only at Delphi, but in Delos also,
is simply obsolete.

ZEUS [_suspiciously_].

Again I am not sure that I quite follow you.

PRIEST.

To your Majesty, at least, the New Poetry opens its casket as
widely as the rose-bud does to the zephyr.

ZEUS.

I can follow that--but it rather reminds me of the Old Poetry.

PRIEST.

It was intended to do so. What promptitude of mind! What divine
penetration!

ZEUS [_affably_].

I have always believed that if I had enjoyed leisure from public
life, I should have excelled in my judgment of the f