then
in Mardi, not a lake that was not moist. Lachrymose rivulets, and
inconsolable lagoons! Call you this poetry, minstrel?"

"Mohi has something like a tear in his eye," said Yoomy.

"False!" cried Mohi, brushing it aside.

"Who composed that monody?" said Babbalanja. "I have often heard it
before."

"None know, Babbalanja but the poet must be still singing to himself;
his songs bursting through the turf in the flowers over his grave."

"But gentle Yoomy, Adondo is a legendary hero, indefinitely dating
back. May not his monody, then, be a spontaneous melody, that has been
with us since Mardi began? What bard composed the soft verses that our
palm boughs sing at even? Nay, Yoomy, that monody was not written by
man."

"Ah! Would that I had been the poet, Babbalanja; for then had I been
famous indeed; those lines are chanted through all the isles, by
prince and peasant. Yes, Adondo's monody will pervade the ages, like
the low under-tone you hear, when many singers do sing."

"My lord, my lord," cried Babbalanja, "but this were to be truly
immortal;--to be perpetuated in our works, and not in our names. Let
me, oh Oro! be anonymously known!"

CHAPTER XXXIX
Wherein Babbalanja Discourses Of Himself

An interval of silence was at last broken by Babbalanja.

Pointing to the sun, just gaining the horizon, he exclaimed, "As old
Bardianna says--shut your eyes, and believe."

"And what may Bardianna have to do with yonder orb?" said Media.

This much, my lord, the astronomers maintain that Mardi moves round
the sun; which I, who never formally investigated the matter for
myself, can by no means credit; unless, plainly seeing one thing, I
blindly believe another. Yet even thus blindly does all Mardi
subscribe to an astronomical system, which not one in fifty thousand
can astronomically prove. And not many centuries back, my lord, all
Mardi did equally subscribe to an astronomical system, precisely the
reverse of that which they now believe. But the mass of Mardians have
not as much reason to believe the first system, as the exploded one;
for all who have eyes must assuredly see, that the sun seems to move,
and that Mardi seems a fixture, eternally _here_. But doubtless there
are theories which may be true, though the face of things belie them.
Hence, in such cases, to the ignorant, disbelief would seem more
natural than faith; though they too often reject the testimony of
their own senses, for what to them,