support of theories about himself which, one by one, had yielded to the obstructive facts of life. I and rubber crutches, he reflected.
Keyserling set in train a whole new category of speculations which blessedly crowded back the dreary thoughts he had brought with him from France. He found himself jotting down exciting little phrases on scraps of paper. One morning he leaped out of bed and wrote a poem, the first since the days when all his verses had begun, "Roses are red, violets are blue." On analysis it sounded like a bad Shakespearian sonnet and he tore it up, but he was obliged to admit that a new germination was taking place within him.
A few nights later he dreamed that he was a book, walking along a high windy cliff, down to a cobalt sea. The pages fluttered wildly, and he was afraid the letters would fall out of the words, which would have been a dreadful calamity, for he wished to let the letters dry in their words, like seeds in pods, for future planting.
Excited by his dream, he sat self-consciously before a pad of blank paper which he had run out of the hotel to buy. "Once in my antique youth," he began—but the poem got no further; it turned into a letter to Geoffrey Saint.
"I must finally confess," he wrote, "that I'm a Philistine. Nor am I ashamed of it now, though a few months ago I would have felt it a debasing admission. My justification is this, that while the doggedly
