482
PARTISAN REVIEW
And on the nimble feet of a little child in came the new, in came
her sister, but her face was not to be seen, nothing of her was clearly
to
be
seen except that she was small and delicate, had on brown
shoes, was brown in face and brown in dress and that she could
dance with enchanting perfection. And moreover the Boston-the
dance her future lover did not know by any means well. Nothing
could have better expressed the superiority of the child over the
grown, experienced, often disillusioned man than that she danced
so freely, lithely, faultlessly, and in particular the dance in which he
was weak, in which he was hopelessly inferior to her!
All day the writer remained busied with his dream, and the
deeper he penetrated into it the more beautiful it appeared to him
and the more it seemed to excell all the poems of the best poets. For
a long time, for many days, he cherished the desire to record this
dream
so
that it would have, not for the dreamer alone but for others
as well, this unspeakable beauty, depth and intensity. Only at long
last he abandoned these wishes and efforts and realized that he must
content himself with being a true poet, a dreamer, a seer, only in his
soul, and that his handiwork must remain that of a simple man of
letters.
TRAGIC
When the editor-in-chief was told that Johannes the com–
positor had been waiting for an hour in the anteroom and would on
no account be turned away or put off, he nodded with a smile of
melancholy resignation and swung around in his office chair to
meet his silently entering visitor. He knew in advance what sort of
request had brought the faithful, white-bearded compositor to see
him, knew the request was a hopeless one, both sentimental and
boring, and knew that he could not meet this man's wishes or do
him any other service except to listen courteously to what he had
to say. Since the petitioner, who had served the newspaper as
typesetter for many years, was not only a sympathetic and worthy
human being but an educated man as well, an author in fact, who
had been highly esteemed in the pre-modern period, had been indeed
almost famous, the editor experienced on the occasions of his visits,
