At last Basil pointed out the table-rock in the middle of the fall, from
which Sam Patch had made his fatal leap; but Isabel refused to admit that
tragical figure to the honors of her emotions. "I don't care for him!"
she said fiercely. "Patch! What a name to be linked in our thoughts with
this superb cataract."
"Well, Isabel, I think you are very unjust. It's as good a name as
Leander, to my thinking, and it was immortalized in support of a great
idea, the feasibility of all things; while Leander's has come down to us
as that of the weak victim of a passion. We shall never have a poetry of
our own till we get over this absurd reluctance from facts, till we make
the ideal embrace and include the real, till we consent to face the music
in our simple common names, and put Smith into a lyric and Jones into a
tragedy. The Germans are braver than we, and in them you find facts and
dreams continually blended and confronted. Here is a fortunate
illustration. The people we met coming out of this pavilion were lovers,
and they had been here sentimentalizing on this superb cataract, as you
call it, with which my heroic Patch is not worthy to be named. No doubt
they had been quoting Uhland or some other of their romantic poets,
perhaps singing some of their tender German love-songs,--the tenderest,
unearthliest love-songs in the world.
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