at the Great Stone Face.

'Good evening,' said the poet. 'Can you give a traveller a night's
lodging?'

'Willingly,' answered Ernest; and then he added, smiling, 'Methinks I
never saw the Great Stone Face look so hospitably at a stranger.'

The poet sat down on the bench beside him, and he and Ernest talked
together. Often had the poet held intercourse with the wittiest and
the wisest, but never before with a man like Ernest, whose thoughts
and feelings gushed up with such a natural feeling, and who made great
truths so familiar by his simple utterance of them. Angels, as had
been so often said, seemed to have wrought with him at his labor in
the fields; angels seemed to have sat with him by the fireside;
and, dwelling with angels as friend with friends, he had imbibed the
sublimity of their ideas, and imbued it with the sweet and lowly charm
of household words. So thought the poet. And Ernest, on the other hand,
was moved and agitated by the living images which the poet flung out
of his mind, and which peopled all the air about the cottage-door with
shapes of beauty, both gay and pensive. The sympathies of these two men
instructed them with a profounder sense than either could have attained
alone. Their minds accorded into one strain, and made delightful
music which neither of them could have claimed as all his own, nor
distinguished his own share from the other's. They led one another, as
it were, into a high pavilion of their thoughts, so remote, and hitherto
so dim, that they had never entered it before, and so beautiful that
they desired to be there always.

As Ernest listened to the poet, he imagined that the Great Stone Face
was bending forward to listen too. He gazed earnestly into the poet's
glowing eyes.

'Who are you, my strangely gifted guest?' he said.

The poet laid his finger on the volume that Ernest had been reading.

'You have read these poems,' said he. 'You know me, then--for I wrote
them.'

Again, and still more earnestly than before, Ernest examined the poet's
features; then turned towards the Great Stone Face; then back, with an
uncertain aspect, to his guest. But his countenance fell; he shook his
head, and sighed.

'Wherefore are you sad?' inquired the poet. 'Because,' replied Ernest,
'all through life I have awaited the fulfilment of a prophecy; and, when
I read these poems, I hoped that it might be fulfilled in you.'

'You hoped,' answered the poet, faintly smiling, 'to find in me