* * *

Of all the forms with which he had peopled its loneliness, these had the
most profound influence on her in their fair, passionless, majestic
beauty, in which it seemed to her that the man who had forgotten them
had repeated his own likeness. For they were all alike, yet unlike; of
the same form and feature, yet different even in their strong
resemblance, like elder and younger brethren who hold a close
companionship. For Hypnos was still but a boy with his blue-veined
eyelids closed, and his mouth rosy and parted like that of a slumbering
child, and above his golden head a star rose in the purple night.
Oneiros standing next was a youth whose eyes smiled as though they
beheld visions that were welcome to him; in his hand, amongst the white
roses, he held a black wand of sorcery, and around his bended head there
hovered a dim silvery nimbus. Thanatos alone was a man fully grown; and
on his calm and colourless face there were blended an unutterable
sadness, and an unspeakable peace; his eyes were fathomless,
far-reaching, heavy laden with thought, as though they had seen at once
the heights of heaven and the depths of hell; and he, having thus seen,
and knowing all things, had learned that there was but one good possible
in all the universe,--that one gift which his touch gave, and which men
in their blindness shuddered from and cursed. And above him and around
him there was a great darkness.

So the gods stood, and so they spoke, even to her; they seemed to her as
brethren, masters, friends--these three immortals who looked down on her
in their mute majesty.

They are the gods of the poor, of the wretched, of the outcast, of the
proscribed,--they are the gods who respect not persons nor palaces,--who
stay with the exile and flee from the king,--who leave the tyrant of a
world to writhe in torment, and call a smile beautiful as the morning on
the face of a beggar child,--who turn from the purple beds where wealth
and lust and brutal power lie, and fill with purest visions the darkest
hours of the loneliest nights, for genius and youth,--they are the gods
of consolation and of compensation,--the gods of the exile, of the
orphan, of the outcast, of the poet, of the prophet, of all whose bodies
ache with the infinite pangs of famine, and whose hearts ache with the
infinite woes of the world, of all who hunger with the body or the
soul.

* * *

It became mid-April. It was market