pages of
_Men and Women_, some of which, even after profound study, he will not
be able to construe at all, and not one of which he will be able to
read off at sight. Let us take one or two selections at random from the
first volume, and try. What, for instance, is the meaning of these four
stanzas from the poem entitled "By the Fireside"?--

My perfect wife, my Leonor,
Oh, heart my own, oh, eyes, mine too,
Whom else could I dare look backward for,
With whom beside should I dare pursue
The path grey heads abhor?

For it leads to a crag's sheer edge with them;
Youth, flowery all the way, there stops--
Not they; age threatens and they contemn,
Till they reach the gulf wherein youth drops,
One inch from our life's safe hem!

With me, youth led--I will speak now,
No longer watch you as you sit
Reading by fire-light, that great brow
And the spirit-small hand propping it
Mutely--my heart knows how--

When, if I think but deep enough,
You are wont to answer, prompt as rhyme;
And you, too, find without a rebuff
The response your soul seeks many a time
Piercing its fine flesh-stuff--

We really should think highly of the powers of any interpreter who could
"pierce" the obscurity of such "stuff" as this. One extract more and we
have done. A gold medal in the department of Hermeneutical Science to
the ingenious individual, who, after any length of study, can succeed in
unriddling this tremendous passage from "Master Hugues of Saxe-Gotha,"
the organist:--

First you deliver your phrase
--Nothing propound, that I see,
Fit in itself for much blame or much praise--
Answered no less, where no answer needs be:
Off start the Two on their ways!

Straight must a Third interpose,
Volunteer needlessly help--
In strikes a Fourth, a Fifth thrusts in his nose,
So the cry's open, the kennel's a-yelp,
Argument's hot to the close!

One disertates, he is candid--
Two must dicept,--has distinguished!
Three helps the couple, if ever yet man did:
Four protests, Five makes a dart at the thing wished--
Back to One, goes the case bandied!

One says his say with a difference--
More of expounding, explaining!
All now is wrangle, abuse, and vociferance--
Now there's a truce, all's subdued, self-restraining--
Five, though, stands out all the stiff