"What do you see in the mirror," said the old man, "that you gaze so earnestly in it?"
"I see," answered the minstrel, "the infinite miracle of the universe, I see the august and lonely elements, I see the solitary stars and the untiring sea, I see the everlasting hills—and, as a crocus raises its rainbow head from the black earth in springtime, I see the young moon growing like a slender flower out of the mountains...."
"Yet, look again," said the old man, "into this other mirror, the mirror of the princess. Look again."
And the poet looked—taking the two mirrors in his hands, and looking from one to the other.
"At last," he said, gazing into the face he had fought so long to keep—"at last I understand that this is but a fleeting phantom of beauty, a fluttering flower of a face—just one beautiful flower in the innumerable meadows of the Infinite—but here...."
And he turned to the other mirror—
"Here is the Eternal Beauty, the Divine Harmony, the Sacred Unfathomable All.... Would a man be content with one rose, when all the roses of all the rose-gardens of the world were his?..."
"You mean," said the wise old man, smiling to himself, "that I may take the mirror back to the princess.... Are you really willing to exchange her face for the face of the sky?"
"I am," answered the minstrel.