Long residence in its precincts, howbeit, may tend to produce a haughty disregard of the brethren acclimated to lower levels. Your roof-perching hermit, whose lungs are inflated with rude health, scoffs at the genteel ailments accruing below from the largesses of carbonic acid gas. His own dais-like elevation breeds arrogance in him, and patrician scorn; his descent to the vantage-ground of the majority is palpable indeed. He cannot, at most, walk their paths, save, metaphorically, on stilts, like the shepherds of the Landes. He is accustomed to live cheek-by-jowl with Arcturus. A kite or a balloon he acknowledges, but no terrene mail-service or horse-car. Valleys and cellars distress him. He cannot lie on the grass of a summer's day, to watch a colony of ants. He is of a loftier cast of mind, and sighs rather for the shining motes of the Milky Way, "scattered unregarded upon the floor of heaven." We have known him to refuse a June cherry, plucked only amidmost of the tree. What is such a bigot to do, but thrust his tall head back, out of alien air, into his sixth-story Arcady where the Muse sits, waiting for him, on a collapsing chair?
"Dans un grenier qu'on est bien à vingt ans!"
So have we sought the heights, and clove unto them, in orthodox privacy, though lacking our just deserts of the aforesaid lady's favor. Yet do we in nothing reproach thee, eyry of our youth! with thy beloved townish outlook and undusted shelves, save that the tutelary pages born of thee are scarce of so Attic a flavor as our sense of the due sequence of things hath led us to desire.
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