Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 132.djvu/131

Rh as often in the fields as in the courtyard of the château."

"But don't you sometimes feel sorry that you have never risen to be more than a country workman? Are you not grieved when you have finished anything as fine as your carving of the Virgin, to have people come here and tell you it is bad?"

Jahona shrugged his shoulders and smiled, but I thought his smile was very sad.

"Those who pay have a right to find fault, monsieur," he answered.

I cannot describe how his brave words affected me.

We left the house, and when we had gone a few yards we turned and looked behind us.

Jahona was standing outside his tall cottage looking up at it with an expression in his face, as if he saw in "his mind's eye"the great white sails of his windmill turning slowly in the air.

Our eyes met, and he saw I knew what he was thinking.

"Yes, monsieur," he said, smiling, "one of these days I make sure of seeing four strong arms up yonder doing my work for me, — great arms of oak and canvas which will work, and not grow weary; and when that comes to pass I shall live at my ease for the future. I shall be able to think and plan in peace without having my customers displeased because I have not finished the work I promised them. A miller's life is a very easy one. So long as he hears his sails creak he may make himself contented. The wind of the good Master is providing his daily bread. If you ever come back into this neighborhood, monsieur, and catch a glimpse from the hills yonder of four sails revolving in this direction, you may safely say, 'There lives a man who has nothing more to ask from the kind hand of his Heavenly Father.'"

After saying these words with a sort of rustic elegance, and great depth of feeling, Jahona took off his broad hat, and went back into his dwelling.

"Well!" said my friend the doctor, when we had gone a little way, "what do you think of him?"

"That he is a great genius, whose powers will result in nothing, alas! but a bad timepiece and a windmill."

"Provided he ever builds his mill," said my companion.

"Why shouldn't he build his windmill?"

"He has disease of the heart, but does not know it," replied the doctor. "In eighteen months from now he will be dead, and will never have finished his windmill."

I stopped short, with a sharp cry, and gave a frightened glance back at the curious cottage.

Its poor proprietor had again come out, and stood before his door, looking upward with a smile, and his three little children were playing on the threshold.

 

 From The Spectator.

thought he had proved that as civilization grew, poetry must decline. But that, we take it, is a delusion of the same type as those which beset men as they grow old, and make them dream that it is the world at large which is losing its vivacity and freshness, and not their own individual life. We can, to some extent, understand the fear which Mr. Ruskin and others cherish that civilization and its mechanism are dangerously invading the field of true art. It is quite true, we take it, that the sphere of art is the sphere of free and pliant life, and that the factory, the engine, the machine, and all that the factory, the engine, and the machine produce, in bearing the impress of a strict and iron rule, exclude the free creative beauty which is the very life of art. But the same fear has really no application to poetry. Its sphere is so wide that as long as the will is free and the affections of man are fresh, there need be no fear in the world for any narrowing of the sphere of poetry. In the minutest crevices between the most rigid mechanism of life, poetry can grow as easily as the flower between the angles of a wall, or a swallow, destined to range the seas and migrate to the delights of an African winter, in the grim niches of a London chimney. The fears which periodically send a shiver through society lest the fountains of poetry be dried up, are only the hallucinations of men whose own imaginations are growing cold, and unable to enter into the vividness of the last breath that has stirred the hearts of men. In the growing complexity of life, there is, we think, a reason why poetry is likely to treat subjects of less massiveness and sublimity than of old, or, when it deals with subjects of a massive and sublime order, why it should be very apt to go back to the old days when life was large and simple, and no longer broken up into so many minute cells of separate interest and significance. But no one can really look carefully into the 