Page:The cream of the jest; a comedy of evasions (IA creamofjestcomed00caberich).pdf/215

 I

Of Poetic Love: Treated with Poetic Inefficiency

So much for what Kennaston termed his "serious reading" in chance-opened pages of the past. There were other dreams quite different in nature, which seemed, rather, to fulfil the function of romantic art, in satisfying his human craving for a full-fed emotional existence—dreams which Kennaston jestingly described as "belles lettres." For now by turn—as murderer, saint, herdsman, serf, fop, pickpurse, troubadour, monk, bravo, lordling, monarch, and in countless other estates—Kennaston tasted those fruitless emotions which it is the privilege of art to arouse—joys without any inevitable purchase-price, regrets that were not bitter, and miseries which left him not a penny the worse.

But it was as a lover that his rôle most engrossed him, in many dreams wherein he bore for