Explore "The Cream of the Jest" by James Branch Cabell on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
"This was the measure of my soul's delight; / It had no power of joy to fly by day, / Nor part in the large lordship of the light; / But in a secret moon-beholden way / Had all its will of dreams and pleasant night, / And all the love and life that sleepers may. / "But such life's triumph as men waking may / It might not have to feed its faint delight. "
So much for what Kennaston termed his "serious reading" in chance-opened pages of the past. There were other dreams quite different in nature, which seemed, rather, to fulfil the function of romantic art, in satisfying his human craving for a full-fed emotional existence -- dreams which Kennaston jestingly described as "belles lettres. " For now by turn -- as murderer, saint, herdsman, serf, fop, pickpurse, troubadour, monk, bravo, lordling, monarch, and in countless other estates -- Kennaston tasted those fruitless emotions which it is the privilege of art to arouse -- joys without any inevitable purchase-price, regrets that were not bitter, and miseries which left him not a penny the worse.