Page:The cream of the jest; a comedy of evasions (IA creamofjestcomed00caberich).pdf/154

 corded, "this stately pearl of Greece, fair Helena, the wife to King Menelaus."

And, as has been said, the old idea of muses who actually prompted artistic composition, with audible voices, took on another aspect. He came to suspect that other creative writers had shared such a divided life as his was now, for of this he seemed to find traces here and there. Coleridge offered at once an arresting parallel. Yes, Kennaston reflected; and Coleridge had no doubt spoken out in the first glow of wonder, astounded into a sort of treason, when he revealed how he wrote Kubla Khan; so that thus perhaps Coleridge had told far more concerning the origin of this particular poem than he ever did as to his later compositions. Then, also, I have a volume of Herrick from Kennaston's library with curious comments penciled therein, relative to Lovers How They Come and Part and His Mistress Calling Him to Elysium; a copy of Marlowe's Tragical History of Doctor Faustus is similarly annotated; and on a fly-leaf in Forster's Life of Charles Dickens, apropos of passages in the first chapter of the ninth book, Kennaston has inscribed strange specu