“And you think that you would lose your vision if you went among people?”
“I know that I should.”
“But how do you know?”
“I know because I have tried. You don’t realize how hard I have to work over a thing like this. I have carried it in my mind for a year; I have lived for nothing else—I have literally had no other interest in the world. Every sentence I have read to you has been the product of work added to work—of one impulse piled upon another—of thinking and criticizing and revising. Just the little bit I have done has taken me a whole month, and I have hardly stopped to eat; it’s been my first thought in the morning and my last at night. And when the mood of it comes to me, then I work in a kind of frenzy that lasts for hours and even days; and if I give up in the middle and fall back, then I have to do it all over again. It’s like toiling up a mountain-side.”
“I see,” whispered Corydon. “And then, do you expect to have no human relationships as long as you live?”
Thyrsis pondered for a moment. “Did you ever read Mrs. Browning’s poem, ‘A Musical Instrument’?” he asked.
“No,” she answered.
“It’s a most beautiful poem,” he said; “and it’s hardly ever quoted or read, that I can find. It tells how the great god Pan came down by the river-bank, and cut one of the reeds to make himself a pipe. He sat there and played his music upon it—
‘Sweet, sweet, sweet, O Pan!
Piercing sweet by the river!
Blinding sweet, O great god Pan!
The sun on the hill forgot to die,
And the lilies reviv’d, and the dragon-fly
Came back to dream on the river.
‘Yet half a beast is the great god Pan,
To laugh as he sits by the river,
Making a poet out of a man.
The true gods sigh for the cost and pain,—
For the reed which grows nevermore again
As a reed with the reeds in the river.’”
Thyrsis paused. “Do you see what it means?” he asked.