s,
flows in an exquisite symphony of the tender audacities of tint with
which nature mixes her palette; little notes of chiffon, of tulle, of
feather, blow all about her. This is rather a medley of metaphors, to
which several arts contribute, but you get my meaning?" In making this
appeal, he of the Easy Chair saw in the fixed eye of the poet that
remoteness of regard which denotes that your listener has been hearing
very little of what you have been saying.

"Yes," the poet replied with a long breath, "you are right about that
dreamy weft of leafless twigs against the hard, blue sky; and I wonder
if we quite do justice to the beauty of winter, of age, we poets, when
we are so glad to have the spring come."

"I don't know about winter," he of the Easy Chair said, "but in an opera
which the English Lord Chamberlain provisionally suppressed, out of
tenderness for an alliance not eventually or potentially to the
advantage of these States, Mr. William Gilbert has done his duty to the
decline of life, where he sings,

'There is beauty in extreme old age;
There's a fascination frantic
In a ruin that's romantic'

Or, at least no one else has said so much for 'that time of life,' which
another librettist has stigmatized as

'Bare, ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.'"

"Yes, I know," the poet returned, clinging to the thread of thought on
which he had cast himself loose. "But I believe a great deal more could
be said for age by the poets if they really tried. I am not satisfied of
Mr. Gilbert's earnestness in the passage you quote from the 'Mikado,'
and I prefer Shakespeare's 'bare, ruined choirs.' I don't know but I
prefer the hard, unflattering portrait which Hamlet mockingly draws for
Polonius, and there is something almost caressing in the notion of 'the
lean and slippered pantaloon.' The worst of it is that we old fellows
look so plain to one another; I dare say young people don't find us so
bad. I can remember from my own youth that I thought old men, and
especially old women, rather attractive. I am not sure that we elders
realize the charm of a perfectly bald head as it presents itself to the
eye of youth. Yet, an infant's head is often quite bald."

"Yes, and so is an egg," the Easy Chair retorted, "but there is not the
same winning appeal in the baldness of the superannuated bird which has
evolved from it--eagle or nightingale, parrot or

Many-wintered crow that leads the clang