nstantly, the old
monster, the world, which has no soul--not yet: we are helping it to get
one--becomes a shadow, powerless to stop or overawe. For I do give you
a soul, think as you will of it. I give you strength to realize, courage
to act. It is the soul that does things in this life--the rest is
vapour. How do we distinguish love?--as we do music by the pure note won
from resolute strings. The tense chord is music, and it is love. This
higher and higher mountain air, with you beside me, sweeps me like a
harp.'

'Oh! talk on, talk on! talk ever! do not cease talking to me!' exclaimed
Clotilde.

'You feel the mountain spirit?'

'I feel that you reveal it.'

'Tell me the books you have been reading.'

'Oh, light literature-poor stuff.'

'When we two read together you will not say that. Light literature is
the garden and the orchard, the fountain, the rainbow, the far view;
the view within us as well as without. Our blood runs through it, our
history in the quick. The Philistine detests it, because he has no view,
out or in. The dry confess they are cut off from the living tree, peeled
and sapless, when they condemn it. The vulgar demand to have their
pleasures in their own likeness--and let them swamp their troughs! they
shall not degrade the fame of noble fiction. We are the choice public,
which will have good writing for light reading. Poet, novelist,
essayist, dramatist, shall be ranked honourable in my Republic. I am
neither, but a man of law, a student of the sciences, a politician, on
the road to government and statecraft: and yet I say I have learnt as
much from light literature as from heavy-as much, that is, from the
pictures of our human blood in motion as from the clever assortment of
our forefatherly heaps of bones. Shun those who cry out against fiction
and have no taste for elegant writing. For to have no sympathy with the
playful mind is not to have a mind: it is a test. But name the books.'

She named one or two.

'And when does Dr. Alvan date the first year of his Republic?'

'Clotilde!' he turned on her.

'My good sir?'

'These worthy good people who are with you: tell me-to-morrow we leave
them!'

'Leave them?'

'You with me. No more partings. The first year, the first day shall be
dated from to-morrow. You and I proclaim our Republic on these heights.
All the ceremonies to follow. We will have a reaping of them, and make a
sheaf to present to the world with compliments. To-morrow!'