Prattle: To Fame?

de Reves: The same that Homer knew.

Prattle: Good Lord!

de Reves: Keats never saw her. Shelley died too young. She came late at the best of times, now scarcely ever.

Prattle: But, my dear fellow, you don't mean that you think there really is such a person?

de Reves: I offer all my songs to her.

Prattle: But you don't mean you think you could actually see Fame?

de Reves: We poets personify abstract things, and not poets only but sculptors[7] and painters too. All the great things of the world are those abstract things.

Prattle: But what I mean is, they're not really there, like you or me.

de Reves: To us these things are more real than men, they outlive generations, they watch the passing of kingdoms: we go by them like dust; they are still there, unmoved, unsmiling.