Nay, now 'tis done no tears can aught avail.
I did not ask you to believe in me,
I said our friendship should be based on truth;
You should not think me better than I am—
That for my enemies. I would not feel
I had beguiled you into loving me
And risk an awakening.
I would unveil to you my inmost soul,
You shoull see what you would, judge for yourself,
Select what pleased you for your thought of me.
I can not blame you, for the fault was mine,
But I will not so scorn that part of me
That I hold best, as to admit your justice.
You looked but at the veil,
Passed my unworthiness without a word
And doubted nothing but my love for you.
But, 0 my friend, could you have left me that—
The knowledge' that your friendship trusted mine,
That you believed my love's' sincerity,
Then I had loved you—as I do not now,
Nor ever shall through all eternity.
The paragraph entitled The True Connoisseur in the Bruno,-
nian, expresses a thought which we have long held, and which we
think is held by all true book-lovers. We print the paragraph in
full :
"The most exquisite literary enjoyment is riot to the cold and
over-refined critic, to the connoisseur in words and ideas, who
subjects each new thought to all the tests of a complex and
many-sided system of appreciation. No such deliberately assay,
ing of literature can bring out for us the best that is in it. 1314 t it
is in losing one's self in a 'book profound,' giving up all knowl-,
edge of sound and ense, laying one's self open to every irhpression
that the author may aim to produce,—it is in these that one,
reaches the highest pleasures that books can give. And,• con
versely, it. is in the author's power to produce such results, and
to avoid betraying us after we have become his, that his claim to
greatness must lie."—Walter B. WilbuiA. ,
' Critics, who see things through the eyes of a cynic ? ' have
frequently destroyed. the charm of a book, the music' and beauty of
—Grace Gdbert,