You ascend the capitol, and there you are
crowned with laurel, like the hero of a hundred fights."
"What is the subject of your principal work in this line?"
"Well, madam, I once finished a verse, and was going on with a second,
but, somehow or other, I could not get the words to rhyme."
"Then it occurred to you that you had neither a printer nor readers,
and you broke your lyre?"
"I was about to reproach you, Master Jack," said Wolston, "for
undertaking too many things at once; but I see the ranks are beginning
to thin."
"Beautiful as poetry may be," continued Jack, one gets tired of
reading and re-reading one's own effusions."
"It is even often intensely insipid the very first time," remarked
Mrs. Wolston.
"There still remains painting," continued Jack. "Painting is vastly
superior to either music or poetry. In the first place, it requires no
interpreter between itself and the public;--what, for example, remains
of a melody after a concert? nothing but the recollection. Poesy may
excite admiration in the retirement of one's chamber; your nostrils
are, as it were, reposing on the bouquet, though often you have still
a difficulty in smelling anything. But if once you give life to
canvas, it is eternal."
"Eternal is scarcely the proper word," remarked Wolston: "the
celebrated fresco of Leonardo da Vinci, in the refectory of the
Dominicans at Milan, is nothing but a confused mass of colors and
figures.
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