ss under which I
was laboring I could not have failed to identify you. But you are
generous enough to forgive this oversight I am convinced."

"Oh, surely! it was most natural under the circumstances. I have a habit
of fixing faces at a glance that is rather uncommon, I believe. I never
forget any one I have seen even for a moment, or where I have seen them,
or even a name I have heard."

"A royal gift truly, one of the secrets of popularity, I believe. It is
not so with me usually, though when my eye once drinks in a face" (and
he looked steadily at mine while he spoke those words slowly, as if
wrapped in contemplation), "it never departs again. 'A thing of beauty
is a joy forever,' you know, Miss Monfort." He sighed slightly.

"Yes, that line has passed into an axiom, the only sensible one, I
believe, by-the-by, that Keats ever wrote," I laughed.

"Oh, you do Keats injustice. Have you studied him, Miss Monfort?"

"Studied poetry? What an idea! No, but I have tried to read him, and
failed. I think he had a very crude, chaotic mind indeed; I like more
clearness."

"Clearness and shallowness most often go together," he observed. "When
you see the pebbles at the bottom of a stream, most likely its waters
are not deep."

"Yet, you can stir up mud with a long pole in the pool more readily than
in the river. Keats wanted a current, it seems to me, to give him
vitality and carry off his own mental impurities. His was a stagnant
being."

"What a queer comparison," and he shook his head laughingly, "ingenious,
but at fault; you are begging the question now. Well, what do you say to
Shelley?"

"I have nothing to say to him; he has every thing to say to me. He is my
master."

"An eccentric taste for so young a girl; and Byron? and Moore? and Mrs.
Hemans? and Leigh Hunt? and Barry Cornwall?"

"Oh, every one likes _them_, but one gets tired of hearing lions roar,
and harps play, and angels sing; and then one goes to Shelley for
refreshment. He is never monotonous; he was a perennial fountain,
singing at its source, and nearly all was fragmentary that he wrote, of
course, wanting an outlet. The mind finishes out so much for itself,
and the thought comes to one always, that he was completed in heaven. No
other verse stirs me like his. You know he wrote it because he had to
write or die. He was a poet, or nothing."

"You ought to write criticisms for _Blackwood_, really, Miss Monfort,
and give a woman's reason for ever