"Then, don't you like In Memoriam?"
"No; it is weak and exaggerated."
"Ah! you don't understand it. I didn't until after my father died. Then
I began to know what it meant, and now think it the most beautiful poem
I ever read."
"You are fond of poetry, then?"
"I don't read much; but I think there is more in some poetry than in all the prose in the world."
"That is a good deal to say."
"A good deal too much, when I think that I haven't read, I suppose, twenty books in my life—that is, books worth calling books: I don't mean novels and things of that kind. Yet I can not believe twenty years of good reading would make me change my mind about In Memoriam.—You don't like poetry?"
"I can't say I do—much. I like Pope and Crabbe—and—let me see—well, I used to like Thomson. I like the men that give you things just as they are. I do not like the poets that mix themselves up with what they see, and then rave about Nature. I confess myself a lover of the truth beyond all things."
"But are you sure," she returned, looking him gently but straight in the eyes, "that, in your anxiety not to make more of things than they are, you do not make less of them than they are?"
"There is no fear of that," returned Faber sadly, with an unconscious shake of the head. "So long as there is youth and imagination on that side to paint them,—"