anecdotes. When he was tired his lectures
were clouded, obscure, elliptical; but when he
was interested they were wonderful. I believe
that Gaston Cleric narrowly missed being a
great poet, and I have sometimes thought that
his bursts of imaginative talk were fatal to his
poetic gift. He squandered too much in the
heat of personal communication. How often
I have seen him draw his dark brows together,
fix his eyes upon some object on the wall or a
figure in the carpet, and then flash into the
lamplight the very image that was in his brain.
He could bring the drama of antique life be-
fore one out of the shadows -- white figures
against blue backgrounds. I shall never for-
get his face as it looked one night when he
told me about the solitary day he spent among
the sea temples at Paestum: the soft wind
blowing through the roofless columns, the
birds flying low over the flowering marsh
grasses, the changing lights on the silver,
cloud-hung mountains. He had willfully
stayed the short summer night there, wrapped
in his coat and rug, watching the constella-
tions on their path down the sky until "the
bride of old Tithonus" rose out of the sea, and
the mountains stood sharp in the dawn. It

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