.. -*- encoding: utf-8 -*-

.. meta::
   :PG.Id: 45959
   :PG.Title: Open That Door!
   :PG.Released: 2014-06-13
   :PG.Rights: Public Domain
   :PG.Producer: Al Haines
   :DC.Creator: Robert Sturgis Ingersoll
   :DC.Title: Open That Door!
   :DC.Language: en
   :DC.Created: 1916
   :coverpage: images/img-cover.jpg

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OPEN THAT DOOR!
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      OPEN THAT DOOR!

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      BY

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      ROBERT STURGIS INGERSOLL

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      PHILADELPHIA & LONDON
      \J. \B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY
      1916

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      COPYRIGHT, 1916, BY J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY

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      PUBLISHED SEPTEMBER, 1916

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      PRINTED BY J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY
      AT THE WASHINGTON SQUARE PRESS
      PHILADELPHIA, U.S.A.

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   CONTENTS

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   CHAPTER

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I.  `Walled In`_
II.  `An Open Door`_
III.  `Reading Fiction with an Eye on Life`_
IV.  `History and Your Vote`_
V.  `Clio's Vintage`_
VI.  `The Poet and the Reader`_
VII.  `The Children of Pan`_
VIII.  `Men Behind Books`_
IX.  `Keeping up with Life`_





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.. _`WALLED IN`:

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   OPEN THAT DOOR!

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   CHAPTER I

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   WALLED IN

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The brave man carves out his fortune, and every
man is the son of his own works.—CERVANTES

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An author is of necessity a rather
egotistical sort of a fellow, or else he
would not trumpet abroad his name
upon the title-page of a book.  If we
should measure this egotism by the
size of the audience to which he hopes
to appeal, we fear that the sponsor of
this little book should make humble
apologies in behalf of his phrenological
egocentric bump.  He who writes
upon how to grow fat, modestly limits
his audience to those who, from pride
of appearance, or upon doctor's
orders, desire to add to their
avoirdupois.  There is a similar modesty upon
the part of those who limit their
audiences by writing cook-books for the
cooks, temperance appeals for the
drunkards, novels for the seminary
ladies, war books for the valiant,
peace books for the pacificists.  We
(notwithstanding the fact that he
fears to call himself "I" in the first
chapter) acknowledge no such
modesty.  Every one wants to get the best
of life.  This general statement is as
true as the more specific ones that
every one wants to enjoy his dinner,
his work, his family, and his friends.
The desire to obtain satisfaction
through the passing of the years is
the prime motive in the actions of
the male and the female, the fat and
the thin, the long and the short, the
stupid and the wise, the railroad
president and the ditch digger.  It is for
this cosmopolitan, democratic crowd
of you and myself and every one else
that there is, or is not, a message in
the following pages.

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One of the most stimulating
thoughts to which mankind is heir is
the realization of the handicaps under
which we are all laboring.  This is a
great thought in that it is so universal,
so levelling, so powerful in making us
truly appreciate that we are all
brothers one unto another.  The
millionaire is a slave to his money;
another man is embittered by poverty,
a third carries the burden of an
unsound body, a fourth of a selfish
nature, a fifth of an unhappy family
life, a sixth is overwhelmed by his
own stupidity, a seventh by his sense
of duty towards others, an eighth by
a sense of duty towards himself, and
so it goes through the rank and file,
the humble and the mighty.  How
many of us take the bit in our teeth,
and have a glorious revel in enjoying
every furlong of life's race-course?
To run such a race is a hard task, as
there is always some handicap
hanging on our shoulders.  We are afraid
to knock it off.  Oftentimes the burden
is terrifically hard for the man who
carries it to define, and yet, when you
look into your inmost self you realize
that the precious hours of life are
slipping by without your cramming
into them all the good things that you
feel should be offered by a world in
which there is the romance of other
people's lives, the blue of the sky, the
play of the sunlight, the success of
your rivals.  There seems too often a
wall between ourselves and that
romance, that sky, that sunlight and that
success.  There is indeed this wall
between us and our ideal.  If we
break through it, there is another one
that dares our courage to the assault
and capture of our greater, enlarged
ideal.  This is stimulating and
comforting, as each man and woman has
to make his own assault; there is no
one so lucky as to get the prizes of
life without a fight, and no one so
unlucky as to be without the desire, no
matter how deeply it may be buried in
his nature, to make that fight.

In what direction are you going, and
what are you going to do when you
get there?  Are you plugging against
an impassable barrier, or is there a
way through for the man who does his
best?  Some lie down in the traces
and quit.  They have three satisfactory
meals a day, work that is not too
arduous, a warm bed at night, and,
taking it all in all, that is sufficient;
at any rate, they think it better than
the attempt to break down any more
walls.  Perhaps they bruised their
knuckles at the first: "George
Washington, Thomas Edison, and the other
heroes were not afraid of the blows at
the first or at the score that followed,
but we all cannot be great, and I am
willing to subside with what is already
my portion."  Yes, that is the attitude
of the slackers.  They are in every
walk of life—the stupidly content.

There are many others who say that
if they could only lift the mortgage
off their house, or buy an automobile,
or get into society, or get promoted,
they could pass untouched through the
barrier that crushes them, and be
ready to tackle the second with
unheard-of power.  They are sadly
suffering under an illusion.  When you
take the spur from a laggard steed,
you do not make him a thoroughbred.

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Two thousand years ago Christ told
us that unless we become as little
children we cannot enter the Kingdom of
Heaven.  That was a tremendous
statement, and one of infinite truth.
To find the reasons for our struggles
and the means of carrying our
burdens we must go to the boy of ten.

He is having a splendid time!  Are
you?  From the moment he leaves his
bed with a whoop and a hurrah, until
the evening when he sinks to sleep
exhausted but happy, he has lived in a
turmoil of adventure, wild dreams,
and imaginings.  The world has been
a magic pleasure dome from which
there were countless doors to be
opened and beckoning passages to be
explored.  We have our troubles and
sulk under their weight, he longs for
them and so invents the game of
Cowboys and Indians and glories in the
battle; we become bored with a
routine existence, he scorns such an
attitude and fears that he will miss a
great excitement if he but close an
eye.  If rainy weather or a particular
mother prevents him from organizing
a military campaign, fraught with
danger and hardship, against the
enemies in the next block, he stays at
home and reads of battling with
dragons.  The world is forever a thing
of wonder, a tremendous feast from
which he is forever called before he
has had sufficient courses.  Hungry
for life, he cannot find within the
twenty-four half enough hours to
fulfil his demands.  A fishing-rod in his
eyes is a magic thing with an incarnate
life and power of its own; the dark
pool contains a possible catfish, and
what, by all the stars, could be more
wonderful, more inexplicable, more
mysterious and awe inspiring than a
bearded catfish!  Every new friend,
old or young, is a peculiar individual
of which he must ask a thousand
questions to find out whether he be an
engineer, a policeman, or a fireman,
or whether he can spin a top or owns
a collection of postage stamps.

What a lesson in the way of life is
a lad of ten!  He sees in life an
opportunity, a vast opportunity for
everything.  No specialist is he—within
the month he decides that his
career shall lie in any one of a dozen,
from that of the man upon the back
of the ice wagon, to that of the
President of the United States.

Why are the young so superior to
their elders?  Why, indeed, do we have
to cast off our years to enter the
Kingdom of Heaven?  Ponce de Leon, in
search of the Fountain of Youth,
journeyed from Spain to the New
World, and, weary of the quest, left
his body to rot in the American
wilderness.  He need not have gone so far
upon his travels, as in the point of
view of the last boy whom he met
before embarking from the shores of
Spain there was this very Fountain
which he sought.  To break down all
the barriers which hedge us in, to open
a thousand doors entering upon
undiscovered countries of ambition and
delight, to forget time, to forget
everything but the joy of living, to
experience the thrill of carrying heavy
burdens and the overcoming of
obstacles, all we have to do is to see the
world through the eyes of the boy of
ten.  It is the youth's relation to the
world as he finds it that makes him
superior to, and a more worthy
inheritor of the Kingdom than is his
father.  The former's outlook is that
of perpetual wonderment, of endless
romance, of intensive interest, and
wide horizons; the latter's too often
is that of a blind man in a picture
gallery.  A lad lives acutely, never
lets an hour "slip by," is ever willing
for an assault against any battlement,
and in that lies the secret of life.

Most things, to be sure, are "easier
said than done," but after having
found that the proper door to open
is that which leads to the world of
fervid expectancies, experienced by
the boy, we may at least *attempt* to
find the key that fits the lock.
Perhaps you have already found it!  This
is a good personal test—do you feel
that your mind is a-tingle with the
music that is played by the world in
which you live?

It has been said that you can tell a
man by the company he keeps—but
there are far better methods!  Find
out his experiences when he walks
along a city street, rubbing elbows
with the crowd, dodging motors at the
crossings, with every step he takes
passing faces, human faces, passing
windows behind which are woven the
webs of human happiness and grief.
What are his innermost sensations?
Does he feel the throbbing pulse of
men and women, or is his heart and soul
dead and forbidding?  Or else go with
him upon a walk into the country—Spring
or Fall—Winter or Summer—his
talk and expression will show the
stuff that is in him.  Is he alive to the
multifarious beauties of color, life,
and movement that are about him, or
is he the same gnarled, twisted parody
of man who, when in the office, always
thinks himself imposed upon, or in his
home appears a misfit, uncomfortable
piece of furniture?

Yes, there is a sublime religion in
the joy of jostling your fellows in the
workaday streets, there is a sublime
possibility of growth in the soul of
him who, when upon a journey in the
country, breathes a deep and lasting
draught of the joyousness of life.
And yet, why does this religion slip
from us, why at times do we refuse to
grow?  Why do we lose the tingle of
living which is the very essence of the
boy's sense of life?

One man will tell you that he is in
a rut.  He has worked until his youth
is passed, and there is no further
chance of promotion.  A second has
lost his money, and he is bitter against
the world that took it from him.  A
third misses the companions whom he
used to know, and with them went the
color and the value of the world.  A
fourth has gambled with life's good
things: has wasted his body and mind
in his lust for women, wine, or food,
or in his greed for gold.  Perhaps,
although not admitted, with the
satisfaction of his desires women have lost
their beauty, wine and food their taste,
and gold has proved tarnished metal.

What is, at bottom, the matter with
them all?  And what is the matter
with the men and women who have
had worldly success, who have had
all the exterior things that life could
give them, and yet feel that this Earth
is an unsatisfactory sort of pasture
in which to graze?  Why should there
be sighs of discontent when above us
the sky is blue, and in the world about
us children are born of women, heroic
deeds are accomplished, and tragedies
met and defeated by the courage and
love of our human kind?

The answer is in the fact that many
of us lose the blessed heritage that
was part of our youth: our sense of
wonderment, our breadth of sympathy.
To the youth, every moment
of every day meant an awakening to
new things, an introduction to strange,
exciting mysteries, whereas there are
no such awakenings for the man who
finds not the wonder in the windows
bordering and the faces passing on
the crowded city streets, or feels not,
in the country, the subtle magic of
Nature's workings.

You say the world grows stale; it
is not the world grown stale that takes
the lustre from life, it is your own
sleepiness, the profound drunkenness
of the lazy and the cold heart.  It is
the loss of a personal sympathy with
God and man.

A loss of sympathy is a horrible
thing.  The loss of that sympathy
which holds your heart engripped, and
makes you feel part and parcel of
this great, moving, turbulent,
sorrowing thing we call the World, is as
grievous a loss as can befall any man.
It is worse than a separation from
money, friends or family—it is the
loss of an individual's personal stake
in the world.  And yet, we see men
who have lost and are losing it.  In
them we see die that spark of life
which has made them an integral part
of all that lives.  We see smothered
the divine fire of humanity and
godliness.  If we consider Nature,
including man, as one great spirit, we feel
that those who have lost an embracing
sympathy are apart from that great
spirit, are drifting off into the barren
deserts of bewilderment and decay.
If we consider men as individual souls
plotting their own destinies, we must
see in those who have lost their
intimate touch with the surge of their
fellows' labors, and their sympathy
to the power of beauty, pariahs, true
outcasts, apart and alone.

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How great is your appetite for life?
How great is your willingness to break
the shell of your prison and liquidate
your heart?  What prevents you from
throwing open your arms to the
universe, accepting and welcoming the
embrace?  The embrace of humanity
is a glorious thing!  It is the nectar of
the gods.  Be one with the world, be
not a pariah; be part of the great
wave, be not a stagnant pool.

But one hears answers, "I can't,"
"I don't want to," "I'm apart and
will not mingle."  Why can't you?
Why won't you?  Why are you apart?
Is it because you are old and
mummified?  Have you lost your vision, have
you lost your heart, has the world
beaten you back, and does life roll too
fast a pace?  Has your understanding
become blunted?  Are you a snob
upon a pedestal of derision?  Are your
eyes blind to the colors, your ears
deaf to the music, your voice bitter
in your companions' hearing?

Ah, let there be a way out of the
prison—there is a door that will lead
you to your youth.  Within a man
there is always the spark that can be
made to brighten and to break into
living flame.  There is no understanding
so dense, no spirit so sordid that
it cannot be stirred to awaken to that
sympathy for man and nature that is
the pass word to the Kingdom of Life.

"The Kingdom of Life."  Those
are perhaps hackneyed words, and yet
how many of us seem to be the
inheritors of the Kingdom of Death.  Live
bodies find no value in dead souls, so
let us make our souls aflame and attain
to a realization of life.  Where is the
match to strike the light, the key to
open the door?

Through all the ages there has been
a medium through which the hearts
of men have been revealed.  There
has been one cauldron into which the
riches of our richest and most godlike
minds have been poured.  It is the
melting pot that has purified the
sorrows and joys of men, since man had
wit enough to know his pangs and
jubilations.  There is a vehicle which
will bring us to a universal sympathy,
if not an understanding, of our human
kindred.  There is a powerful tool,
welded by man, with which we can
awaken ourselves to an appreciation
of our universe, from which we can
obtain consolation in our difficulties,
stimulus for our ambitions, tonic for
our depressions.  The medium, the
cauldron, the vehicle, the tool is
Literature.

Some men are afraid of books, and
some are afraid of life; some do not
understand books, and some do not
sympathize with, nor care to
understand life.  Literature is the key to
the door of life for those who wish to
open!  There is no wall cramping the
ambitions, blinding the eyes,
deafening the ears of those who seek their
nutriment in the spiritual messages
and solemn understandings of the
greatest minds of the ages.  The
symbol of a man walking down the
street with no heart to feel, nor mind
to understand the happenings about
him, is the relationship between two
stones.  To our knowledge there is no
known communication between one
and the other.  Literature is the great
communicator, the powerful disseminator
of sympathies, the magnificent
doorway through which we can pass
to other men's hearts, and obtain
warmth for our own in case ours are
cold and comfortless.

God said, "Let there be light," and
there was light.  Perhaps there is not
enough, for we all walk in partial
darkness, but the tremendous sunburst
that is here to lighten and revive
is the lasting, printed word, handed
on from generation to generation.





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.. _`AN OPEN DOOR`:

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   CHAPTER II


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   AN OPEN DOOR

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   |      This world's no blot for us,
   |  Nor blank; it means intensely, and means good:
   |  To find its meaning is my meat and drink.
   |                          FRA LIPPO LIPPI

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There is the Rub!  Of how many
of us can it be said that the World
"means intensely and means good"?
Do we unsatisfactorily stutter, and
stumble, and barely exist through the
three score years and ten that is our
portion, or do we find in life a splendid
activity that gladdens our heart and
fills us full of the thorough-going
ecstasy of living?

I have a friend who is a great
athlete,—an oarsman, mountain
climber, big game hunter.  He exults
in a life of action, of doing big things,
and yet withal, he is a tremendous
reader and one of exquisite taste and
wide knowledge in books and authors.
I asked him of the value of reading.

"Every time I read a great book,"
he answered, "I feel as if I had
punched a hole through the wall," and
so saying he crashed his large fist
against a buttress of reinforced
concrete.  "I feel that my world has been
made larger; where before I had only
seen a blank space, now I see a new
world, the world in which the author
lived.  I am that much more alive to
my own."

He applied his reading to his daily
life, and the world became for him a
richer, more exciting place in which
to live.  No one wants to plod through
the world in a blind, sleepy fashion.
We all want to live as keenly, as vitally
as possible.  The roots of the present
are buried deep in the past—to
appreciate and have understanding of
the present you must appreciate and
have understanding of the past—to
realize how small and one-sided is
your own point of view, you must
appreciate the thousand and one
viewpoints that have appeared through the
ages to the eyes of other men and
women.

In beginning to form the habit of
reading, the first thing to be realized
is that books are intimately connected
with the world in which we live.  Their
true value does not come from the
pleasure you experience during the
actual hours in which you are turning
the pages, but (and this point cannot
too vividly be borne in mind) in the
reaction of you upon the world and
the world upon you after having read
them.  If a book does not influence
your point of view towards God, your
fellow men, and your daily tasks and
ambitions, you may feel assured either
that the book is one of little worth, or
that you have not absorbed its true
meaning.  When you hear someone
say that reading is an excellent way
to pass the time, you may feel sure
that he knows little about books.  The
poem, the novel, the history, the
philosophy are not to pass the time,
they are to make more vital the hours
of life.  A book that is a book becomes
part and parcel of your being, and you
must of necessity make it part of your life.

Authors are not for the library, they
are for the street, the railroad train,
the office, the open fields.  Read them
in the library, or even in bed, but live
them in the city thoroughfares, or
country roads or workaday places in
which you make your life.  No man
can read the Journals of that mystic,
nature lover, Henry David Thoreau,
without having his next trip to the
country one of greater pleasure.  The
colors and the sounds of the fields, the
woodlands and the brooks will bring
a new joy to his spirit.  No man can
read the novels of some great gobbler
of life, such as eighteenth century
Tobias Smollett, without finding the
city life of our twentieth century more
human, more satisfying, more
exciting.  No man can seriously read a
religious poet such as Whitman or
Wordsworth without becoming more
deeply religious, more keenly
conscious of the wonders of God and Man.
And the Bible—surely no one can read
the magic beauty and truth in the
Prophecies of the Old Testament
without feeling that he has met and
talked with giants.  These books bear
directly on life—they make us think,
love and experience in a way that we
have never done before.  The world
becomes more thoroughly a magic place
in which there are a thousand things
to make life one glorious escapade,
through which we may be thankful
for the opportunity of living.

As some people believe reading to
be a pleasant method of passing the
time (without realizing that time is
in truth passing them), so others
believe that being "well read" is some
sort of a social advantage.  It is
difficult to determine which is the more
stupid and superficial point of view,
that of regarding books as time-killers
or as useful topics of conversation.
The latter is probably the worst, as, in
addition to its superficial aspect, there
is its insincerity.  The man or woman
who reads a great book because it is
"the thing to do" is not only a weak
follower of fashion but a waster of
valuable time.  It is far better never
to have read a book than to have read
it stupidly and begrudgingly with the
thought in mind that it will be a
feather in your cap to be able to boast
of having read it.  Needless as it may
seem to make a point of this, it is,
nevertheless, the idea in the mind of
many a man in college, and many a
woman who joins a reading circle.

Some misguided supporters of the
study of the ancient classics use as a
plea that "every gentleman should
read Greek."  The insincerity of this
defence can only be compared to the
sighs of the woman who attempts to
convince her neighbors that the
beauty of a sunset appeals to her as it
does to no one else, or the ecstatic
murmurings of the young man at the
art exhibition, who is arousing within
himself a false enthusiasm, for some
artistic cult that in truth means
nothing to him.

We see this type of man or woman
all too often.  They are usually
gushing about their latest emotional
experience, when in fact they are
incapable of having any.  It is an
insincere attempt to be the highest of
the high-brows.  Let us have none of
this!  Let us realize that education
and culture are splendid things to be
highly prized, but only in that they
make the individual who possesses
them a richer, deeper, more
sympathetic person.

A hobby, which has to-day become a
fashion, is bird study.  Far be it from
me to disparage the movement
seemingly alive in all our suburban
districts, but let us make short shift with
those who ogle knowingly through
field glasses, when the motive behind
the action is that in select company it
is considered "the thing."

It is a safe warning never to read
a book because it is fashionable.  Never
read a book because you think it will
form an engaging topic of conversation;
always read because you want
to derive a sincere inspiration, an
enlarged point of view.  Within a library
is encased the soul of the past, the
meaning of the present, the promise
of the future.  From it we derive the
entire tradition of which we are
inheritors, the deeper movements of
which we are a part, the prophecies
of the future in which we and ours
will live.  This treasure is more worthy
of respect than to be treated as the
devourer of an idle hour, or the means
whereby to keep "in the swim."

The cultured man is a man of broad
understanding, of deep sympathies.  A
fisherman who knows his boat, his line
and the bay in which he makes his
livelihood may be a cultured man.  He
may have derived from his way of
life and the tools of his trade the
solemn truths that give him an
understanding of the ways of men and the
needs of the human heart; but another
man who has gone through the
University, "machinely made, machinely
crammed," may be totally without
culture in that he has never drunk at
those well-springs of living which
teach the mind the great underlying
sentiments that rule the world.  One
may well be educated and yet
uncultured, "well-read" and yet without
the vision that may be derived from
books.  It is not the word but the
spirit of the word that must be taken
to heart and lived.

Matthew Arnold defined culture as
a knowledge of the best that has been
done and said by man—but the one
who *opens that door* must have more
than that knowledge.  It is not enough
to cram away facts in the corners of
your brain.  These facts must have a
direct bearing upon your life.  To
have knowledge of the best that has
been written, you must not only read
a great poem but you must allow the
thought or fancy to sink into and
become part of your personality; of the
best that has been done you must not
only have knowledge of the courage
and wisdom of the early Americans
who broke the yoke of Great Britain,
but you must apply their courage and
wisdom to your daily life; of the best
that has been said you must not only
read one of Abraham Lincoln's great
speeches, but absorb the quiet
spirituality of the man who uttered them,
and allow his personality to become
part of yours.

Farcical moving-picture shows and
talking-machine rag-time surely have
their place, but can they enter the soul
of man as can "the best that has been
written, done and said"?  The plays
of Euripides and the words of Marcus
Aurelius have for many centuries
given deeper understandings and
wider horizons to a multitude of
readers, and it is probable that the
intensity with which they have acted
upon the individual is commensurate
with the length of time that they have
acted upon the mass.  We do not
believe that this can be said of the
time-killing "movie" or the rag-time song
of yesterday.

Let us enter the world of living
through the world of books.  It is
from the printed page that we can
best equip ourselves for a rich life of
value to ourselves, our family and our
neighbors.  If you do not believe it,
read some book that the world has
acknowledged great.  Having read it,
live it in your eternal self, and you
will have passed through the Open Door.

It is a rainy day at the seashore; I
am writing in the reading room of a
summer hotel.  Without, the rain is
sweeping across the bathing beach, the
tennis courts are flooded, the golf
course, without a doubt, is a swampy
morass.  It is a dreary sight for one
who looks through the window pane.
Our little world is upon a vacation,
and all but the few who wish to tramp
the beach in raincoats and gum boots
must stay in-doors.  And yet there is
happiness, and I believe greater
promise of the morrow.  In one
corner of the room there is a stripling
of about thirteen, curled in a chair,
absorbed in his book, which from
the cover I know to be "Treasure
Island."  He is with Old Pew, John
Silver, and the cut-throat buccaneers.
On the morrow the sand-dunes for
that boy will be places of mystery
where weird and exciting fairy deeds
might have been accomplished.  The
commonplace bathing beach will have
new mysteries, as the waters that
splash at his feet are the same that
surround some sunbaked, South Sea
Treasure Isle.

At the desk opposite me, a student
with furrowed brow reads a calf-skin
volume.  I have noted the title: "The
Speeches of Henry Clay."  Perhaps
this fellow is a young lawyer or an
aspiring politician.  He wishes to
absorb the ideas of the silver-tongued
"Harry of the West," the popular
idol of seventy years ago, and to
consider their bearing upon the tariff
questions of to-day.  He must agree
with Napoleon Bonaparte: "Read and
reflect on history; it is the only true
philosophy."  And there is a girl
reading the poetry of Alfred Noyes,
and a bespectacled, bearded old man
with a volume of Pope.  They have
both turned to poetry to find the
beauty and truth those poets have
seen.  How much will their spirits be
affected, the one by the lyric note of
our contemporary singer, the other by
the didactic moralizing of the philosopher wit?

So it goes!  The boy sees visions of
pirates and adventure, the old man
dreams dreams and seeks new truth;
the young man desires armor for his
life's battle, the girl finds beauty, a
refreshing and invigorating draught.  It
rains to-day but they will all be more
richly endowed to welcome the sun
and sea breezes of the morrow.





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.. _`READING FICTION WITH AN EYE ON LIFE`:

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   CHAPTER III


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   READING FICTION WITH AN EYE ON LIFE

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   |  The world and life's too big to pass for a dream,
   |     \*      \*      \*      \*      \*
   |                    you've seen the world—
   |  The beauty and the wonder and the power,
   |  The shapes of things, their colors, lights and shades,
   |  Changes, surprises,—and God made it all!
   |                                  FRA LIPPO LIPPI

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Our good Brother, Lippo Lippi,
has started off two of my chapters,
and it is well that he should, as no
artist had a keener appetite for life
than had he.  He grasped all there
was of the best in life—color, love,
work—and he enjoyed it.

Librarians, booksellers, and blatant
advertisements assure us that we are a
novel-reading public.  The number of
copies sold of this and that best seller
are at first sight staggering, and even
more so after having read the book!
A certain novel becomes the fashion
in the same inconsequential manner
as does an especially uncomfortable
type of collar—another season both
are forgotten and something new is
taken up.  The writing, publishing
and advertising of such books have
become a purely commercialized art
upon the part of the authors and
booksellers.  "Where are the snows of
yesteryear?" sighed François Villon,
"Where are the masterpieces of last
summer?" sighs the meditative
consumer of fiction.  Almost every novel
which has those qualities which
publishers believe will appeal to an idle,
amusement-loving populace is
proclaimed in display advertising as "the
greatest novel of the decade," "the
great American novel," or in some
other equally false manner.  The
author, the publisher, and even the
readers know that such statements are
utter falsities and yet the sale goes
up into the hundreds of thousands.
I often wonder what has become of
the stupendous number of copies of
a certain book the World was reading
some ten years ago.  It is never
mentioned; it is never read; it is seldom
seen on anyone's bookshelves, yet the
material volumes must be lying about
somewhere.  Perhaps such books are
indeed as "the snows of yesteryear"
and melt away when their day is done.
One who wishes seriously to acquire
the riches there are in books might
well make it a rule never to read a
novel until it has stood the test of
time.  What, bye the bye, is the use
of reading, unless you mean to get the
best out of it?  Walking is better
exercise, conversation more sociable,
gambling more risky and therefore
more full of zest!  Any story worth
reading this summer must surely be
worth reading five years from now.
Life is too short, there are too many
great books that are eminently worth
reading, to spend our time wading
through the ruck of tastefully bound,
hurriedly illustrated, widely
advertised novels that greet us every season.
I repeat—Do not read a book that you
may be in the swing of up-to-date
conversation.  If you do, you prove
yourselves the gull of everyone concerned.
Let time do your winnowing, and if
after five years the people of taste are
still talking of the book, you may turn
to it and probably find something of
true merit.  You may say that with
such a plan you will read but few
modern novels.  Quite true, there will
be but few that stand the test of even
five years, but how much better it is
to conserve your energies and time for
reading the great works of fiction that
have stood the test of generations.

As in all other reading, novels
should awaken you to a new life.  You
should choose those that have the
truest effect upon your goings and
comings after you have put them
aside.  You must agree that those
treating of an impossible, untrue
social condition, as some money-grabbing
manufacturer of stories pretends
to see it, will not have this effect.
Neither will those of untrue chivalry
and sentiment in which untrue ladies
weep unnatural tears, and untrue
heroes do impossible deeds.  Such
trivial falsities merely chew up the
all too few hours allotted mortals upon
this good ship, the Earth.  Which
then are those novels that are to be
read not for the purpose of passing
the time, but of holding up the time,
and of making every minute more
real, more full of meaning,—for that
is the function of all great books?

There is a poem of John Keats
beginning,

   |  Lo—I must tell a tale of chivalry;
   |  For large white plumes are dancing in mine eye.
   |

Perhaps these lines to every one do
not carry the same magic beauty and
promise of long-dreamed-of things
that they do to me.  The poem was
never finished, and I, for one, deeply
regret it, as surely we would have had
a tale to set our hearts afire with the
clangor of the mediæval tournament,
or the lone quest of a golden armored
knight.

Sir Walter Scott told such tales in
prose and his novels are of the
greatest in literature.  Honoré de Balzac
told stories of French life in which
there is nothing specially chivalric,
nothing in that sense bewitching, and
yet his tales, too, are of the greatest in
literature.  The terms Realism and
Romanticism are used to describe two
different aspects of art, music and
literature.  We will use them in
considering the relation of novels to life.

Balzac is considered the father of
modern realism.  This is partly due
to the fact that he presented in a
forceful manner the principles upon which
he worked.  He desired to put the life
of France, city, provincial, military
and official, within the covers of his
books.  It is interesting to remember
that he wrote at a period in which men
were perhaps more interested in the
reason and purpose of human life
than they had ever been before.  Those
scientific discoveries, which were
finally to lead the way to our present
theories of evolution, were bringing
men to a realization that the religious
dogmas upon which they had founded
their faith were weakening.  It was
difficult for a thinking man to believe
that the world had been made out of
whole cloth, but a few thousand years
before.  Science was in the air; faiths
were shattered.  Balzac turned to man
to determine anew his nature.  His
was the huge task of presenting man
in all his loves and hates, purposes and
motives, works and joys.  He
attempted it, and there has been a great
army of writers following in his
footsteps.  Their aim has been to give a
realistic cross section of certain
aspects of life, allowing the reader to
draw inferences as to its meaning and
his personal relation to it.

This is realism.  It is most
unfortunate that in our country the word has
become synonymous with books of a
sordid and erotic nature.  Realism in
literature should show us life as it is,
and as life is neither all sordid nor
all erotic, neither should literature
present only those aspects.  The function
of this type of literature is a great
and important one.

The supreme realist has a God-given
power of seeing and feeling the
forces and emotions that make up
human living.  He sees and examines
life as if under a microscope, and with
this peculiar power he must have the
faculty of expression.  You may ask
how we can apply the words contained
in such a novel to our own life?  We
all feel that there is a great advantage
in "understanding life."  We try to
analyze our own and our friends' ways
of living.  Let us go to great novels
and see what we find there.

Was it a child who said, when going
through the British Museum, that he
liked the sculpture better than the
paintings because he could walk
around the sculpture?  He spoke more
wisely than he knew.  The same simile
may be applied to the realistic novel.
In reading it we may walk about and
examine life.  From day to day, as
we live things happen so rapidly, the
world is passing before us so fast that,
unless you have a supreme intellect,
it is impossible to examine the pageant
but from one point of view.  You can
but look at the front of the picture.
It is flat, there is but little perspective.

The genius with the gift for fiction
such as had Tolstoy, Balzac or
Smollett can encase civilization within
the covers of a book.  You may read
and understand.  There is something
static.  You live a thousand lives by
proxy, you enter a hundred homes
and have converse with the hearts of
men and women.  Instead of seeing
but the front of things, we walk
behind and take in life from every angle.
The characters in the drama of life
are under a microscope through which
we are privileged to look.  Tolstoy
presents life as it was in Russia forty
years ago, but human hearts that are
cosmopolitan and eternal, Balzac, the
France of the forties, Smollett,
England of the eighteenth century.  We
learn the ideals, the struggles, the way
of life of different civilizations, of
different ages.

We find that our point of view is a
narrow one, that our place in the Sun
is perhaps a very small corner, and
our hearts and minds are enlarged to
a deeper sympathy with all men, a
finer understanding of all ideals and
practices.

Instead of living in the little village
of our own outlook, instead of
weighing all experience and action by our
own, we arrive at a higher, more
cosmopolitan point of view.  Whereas
we might think that ours is the only
century in which people flock to the
cities and live material lives of rush
and money-grabbing, we find the same
thing true of Smollett's England of
one hundred and fifty years ago;
instead of condemning the woman who
cannot get along with her husband we
have a broader sympathy for having
followed the career of the splendid
Anna Karenina in Tolstoy's novel of
that name.  We break the shell of our
petty selves which has made for so
many misunderstandings and
prejudices.  We must not pride ourselves
upon our own motives and civilization,
until we have at least made an
attempt to understand those of others.

Since the days when Nathaniel
Hawthorne condensed the spiritual
aspects of New England in his
immortal "Scarlet Letter," there has
been a scarcity of American novels of
any high realistic calibre.  Ernest
Poole has recently done brilliant work
in "The Harbor," in which he
presents the ideals that have guided a
young man of our day and generation.
Yet, here we are, in a strange world
indeed—the greatest spirits hurling
themselves into the strife of
ninety-mile-an-hour living, only to be tossed
aside to make way for younger
and harder workers, more efficient
thinkers.  The strange growling beast
of a great American city, the wide
acres of efficient irrigated farming,
with the workers in each, have yet
even partially to be interpreted by the
genius of fiction.  When it has been
done by the great seers, we will find
answered many questions which
puzzle us to-day.  Not the mirror but
the cosmic microscope must be used
as the tool.  It will not be done by one
man; it will take a literary army—let
the advance guard come with our
generation!

And of Romance—what will we say
of the tales which take us away from
the dusty world of every-day duties
and responsibilities, into a magic
turmoil of brave deeds and devoted
lovers?  We must not forever be
muddling about in the mundane
sphere in which we make our bread
and butter—we must at times for
wealth and happiness gaze through

   |  Charm'd magic casements, opening on the foam
   |  Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.
   |

We of the Anglo-Saxon race have
a glorious heritage in the Waverley
Novels.  Sometimes, we are told that
Sir Walter Scott is becoming a
memory, and that of the past
generation; but many feel, and I am of that
number, that the author of "Ivanhoe,"
"Kenilworth," "Quentin Durward"
and the score of other yarns
which have charmed youth and age
for now well-nigh a century has a
permanent place in our literature,
perhaps only surpassed by William
Shakespeare.  Lucky is the boy or girl
who has grown up, and the older
persons who still sojourn with the
Knights and Ladies, the Kings and
Queens, the Highland Fairies, the
human serfs who march in an endless,
enduring procession through the
pages of the Prince of story tellers.
For such readers the Past is hallowed
with a magic circle that defies tawdriness.
How pleasant it is for one who
lives in a roaring city to be able by
reaching to the book-shelf to forget
the affairs of the day and to live in the
pomp and pageantry, the heroics and
devotions of the Past.  The lover of
Romance may well say to the reader
of modern realism, "Why read of
slums, of offices, and city suburbs
when you may ride out with Prosper
l'Gai in Hewlett's 'Forest Lovers' or
be partner in countless intrigues of
love and swordsmanship through a
dozen of Alexander Dumas' yarns'?"  Why
indeed?—we sometimes wonder.

It is a marvellous gift, that of the
man who can look back into the past
and make it alive and breathing for
the readers of the present.  It is
dangerous to take Dumas and Scott
for our guides to true history, as they
have too often twisted the facts in
order to spin a good tale, but as
revealers of the atmosphere of history,
they are unsurpassed even by the
greatest historians, and if we have the
atmosphere we have a rich and
splendid background in which to place the
facts.  We may sojourn in ancient
Carthage by reading Flaubert's
"Salammbo," in Rome by Sienkiewicz's
"Quo Vadis," in Pompeii by Bulwer
Lytton's "The Last Days of Pompeii,"
in early England by Scott's
"Ivanhoe."  Even those scornful
individuals who pride themselves upon
being "men of the world" have
something to learn if they have only studied
their own time as it goes fleeting past.
For facts let us turn to the scientific
historians, but for life to the historic
romances.

Let us find justification of each
tale, not in its historical accuracy, but
in the fact that "it helps the ear to
listen when the horns of Elf-land
blow."  It is for this that we will read
them,—that we may awake refreshed
as from a plunge in the springs of
Mount Olympus.  If they do not
revivify our jaded senses, and awake
our tired vision to the beauties of
character and nature of the world in
which we live, we may lay them aside
and be sure that the author does not
measure up to the proper standard.
The love of a story is deeply
ingrained in the human heart.  The
baby, before he can read, listens,
fascinated, to the paraphrase of some
classic fairy tale related by his
mother; the minnesinger of old in the
mediæval castle charmed the tired
fighters with tales of greater love and
chivalry; the medicine man recounted
to the savage tribe the sagas of their
ancestral struggles and triumphs; we
all love to hear the man talk who has
been to strange lands and seen strange
peoples.  It is the cry of human nature
for accounts of the doings of men in
worlds in which we live not that
makes the tremendous demand for the
novels of the day.  Let us remember,
however, that the old story tellers, the
medicine men and the mothers with
their infants at their knees told tales
that really fed souls in warming the
hearts and awakening the intellects of
their eager listeners.  The plumed
knight buckled on his armor with
more vigor, and attempted, the next
day, to outdo the deeds of the
minnesinger's hero; the child lived in
fairyland and found a background for his
playing and dreaming; the savage
warrior felt more keen to go upon
the warpath to uphold the tradition
of his ancestors who were watching
him from their places in the Happy
Hunting Ground.

These stories were of the staff of
life to their hearers.  How many of
the novels you read bring nothing but
the means of wasting an hour?  Grown
people to-day must find their stories
in books: there do not frequently come
in our way travellers who have been
overcome with the mystery of far-off
places; we have no longer medicine
men who sing of the glories of our
ancestors; we perforce must turn for
our minnesinger to the printed page.

Let that page be worth while!
Insist upon reading a story that means
something; either that gives you a
more sympathetic understanding of
your fellow men, or an inspiration and
refreshment by allowing a glimpse
through that "magic casement" which
opens to the world of Kings and
Princes, Castles and Feudal Keeps, or
to the mountain where dwelt the Giant
or to the seas upon which sailed the
Pirates of your boyhood.

When novels reveal unknown vistas
of beauty and delight, or present ideas
that jog our thoughtless complacency,
they are of the stuff that intensifies
and glorifies existence.  They keep a
man's mind from being commonplace
and mongrel.  Let us all be Kentucky
thoroughbreds in the way we look
upon the world.  Chafe at your bit,
stamp the ground and be eager to get
away at the front when the barrier
goes up.  Anyone can be an "also
ran."  A good story is often tonic
enough to turn an "also ran" into a
winner!





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.. _`HISTORY AND YOUR VOTE`:

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   CHAPTER IV


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   HISTORY AND YOUR VOTE

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We are much beholden to Machiavel and others,
that write what men do, and not what they ought
to do.—BACON

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One of the greatest evils into which
a democracy may inadvertently slide
is an indifference upon the part of the
populace to the political issues of the
day.  We have upon several occasions
in our history passed through periods
of almost unlimited commercial
prosperity during which everyone has been
too much absorbed in the pursuit of
power and riches to give a thought to
the affairs of government, with the
result that our state and national affairs
have lapsed into disgraceful
conditions of inefficiency and moral
laxity.  Such periods have paved the
way to corrupt boss rule and throttling
machine politics.

Ignorance, which always comes
with indifference, and yet is most
pernicious when most active, is
another extreme and vital danger.  It
must be evident to every thinking
man or woman, that a nation whose
political destinies are in the hands of
the people with their almost universal
franchise should be made up of voters
who are alive and thinking.  "Read
and reflect on history; it is the only
true philosophy," wrote Napoleon
Bonaparte in his instructions
pertaining to the education of his only son,
the King of Rome.  The great Emperor
must have realized that his
phenomenal success in ruling men and
establishing law had as an important
part of its foundation his knowledge
of the affairs of men in the past.
Without suggesting that we should all
be Napoleons, it seems true that our
political fabric would be infinitely
more stable, if the rank and file of
American citizens should feel it a duty
"to read and reflect on history."

With our ever-increasing
number of ignorant Southern European
immigrants, who have come from
countries where republican forms of
government are practically unknown,
it seems that our inherited tradition
of a republican democracy will be
undermined through ignorance,
unless, indeed, these new citizens be
given an understanding of our history
and the meaning of our systems.

To-day many specious types of
radicalism, that are for the most part
pleasant Utopian dreams of the
future, standing upon no foundation
and drawing no nutriment from the
past, are thundered about most
seriously.  In life and in statecraft there
is one great teacher,—Experience.  A
man weighs the advisability of a
certain step by his past experience, and
this must be the basis of thought when
determining matters of political
science.  A reader of American
History may find food for thought in
comparing the manner in which the
half-baked political theorists of
to-day come to their conclusions with
that of the great American
statesmen of the past.  To-day we are
opportunists.  Instead of weighing
experience and testing the future, we
jump helter-skelter at what seems of
temporary value.  In dreaming of the
future you must remember the past
or your dreams are futile.  Emerson
somewhere tells us, that when you are
drawn into an argument upon moral
values, you should always ask your
opponent whether he has carefully
digested his Plato.  If he has not, you
may placidly refuse to continue the
altercation, as he to whom Plato is
unknown is unfit to talk with a
thinking man upon problems of higher
morality.  I believe that in like
manner we could close the mouths of many
trumpeters of social uplift through
sumptuary legislation.  Ask them if
they have carefully read their
histories.  If they have not, and probably
the accent will be on the "not," you
may safely snub them, by insisting
that they turn to the past, before they
have the right to ask people to listen
to their talk of the present and the
future.

At the time of the founding of our
Republic, in Thomas Jefferson, James
Madison, and Alexander Hamilton we
had three supreme *students* of
government.  Perhaps more than to any
other one cause the success of our
"American Experiment" is due to the
profound knowledge and scholarly
attainment of those three men.  Upon
them rested the responsibility of
founding a government "of the
people, for the people, and by the
people" that would neither be
subverted by the wiles of a demagogue or
the power of an oligarchy, nor
become chaotic through the unrestrained
influences of the proletarian populace.
To Jefferson we owe the Declaration
of Independence, to Madison a great
part of the thought and the wording
of the Constitution, to Hamilton the
body of the Federalist Papers.  Their
thought was not the thought of the
minute, but of all time.  In all their
writings we can see their thorough
grasp of the faults and virtues of the
governments of almost every nation
in past ages.  They knew, as too few
of our public men know, that the
future cannot be made out of whole
cloth, but must evolve from the past.
They had studied men and the political
needs and powers of men.  The result
has been the establishment of a
government that has stood the shock of
almost a century and a half, a period
during which almost all other civilized
governments have been the prey not
to peaceful but to violent evolution.
Upon the passing of the great
Revolutionary triumvirate we were
fortunate in having men of the
intellectual calibre of John C. Calhoun,
Henry Clay, and Daniel Webster.
They were thinkers as well as great
orators, students of the past as well
as guardians of the present.

It is a profitable study to read of
the youth of great statesmen.  Almost
invariably you will find them as young
men such as would to-day be sneered
at as "book-worms."  Napoleon, Pitt,
Gladstone, Cavour, Mirabeau, the
great Americans and many, many
others before they entered public life
were profound followers of the
goddess of learning.  It is not
surprising to find that many of them
obtained wisdom and enthusiasm from
the pages of Plutarch's "Lives of the
Ancient Greeks and Romans."  It
was in Greece and Rome that we find
the origins of most of our laws and
institutions, and in the lives of the
men who helped to establish them we
may read of the tests and needs in
their development.  Considering the
studies of great men it is always
amusing to read the calendar which, upon
the request of Mr. Madison, Senior,
it is said, Jefferson arranged for the
working hours of James Madison,
Junior.  Please note that Madison's
health broke down from overstudy
while at Princeton, and it is not to be
wondered at, for here is the schedule:
until eight in the morning he should
confine himself to natural philosophy,
morals and religion; from eight until
twelve, read law and condense cases,
"never using two words where one
will do"; from twelve to one, read
politics in Montesquieu, Locke,
Priestley, Malthus, and the
Parliamentary Debates; in the afternoon
relieve his mind with history, and when
the evening closes in, regale himself
with literature, criticism, rhetoric,
and oratory.

In those days they indeed believed
in thoroughly equipping themselves
for public life!

A few years ago there was an agitation
afoot in favor of establishing the
systems of the Initiative, Referendum,
and Recall.  In the North, the South,
the East, and the West it was hailed
by the spellbinders as the cure-all for
corrupt legislation and undesirable
laws.  It was argued that citizens, who
did not have enough political acumen
to elect honest and efficient
representatives, would have enough to become
their own law-makers.  In the height
of the political campaign Nicholas
Murray Butler, the President of
Columbia University, published a
small book entitled "Why Should We
Change Our Form of Government?"  The
author presented the hazardous
risk that our profoundly important
representative system would run of
being subverted into a chaotic
absolute democracy by instituting laws
that would deprive the executive,
legislative, and judicial departments of
their independence and prestige.  The
republican forms would lapse back
two thousand years to those
democratic systems of the Grecian states
that too invariably paved the way to
the despotism of tyrants or the chaos
of mob rule.

The title of the essay was rather
startling to those who had been
advocating the new measures without
having thoroughly analyzed their true
meaning and import.  The distinguished
scholar brought clear thinking
to bear upon the situation, whereas
before it had been befogged in the
spread-eagle oratory of demagogues,
and the catch-as-catch-can subtleties
of ignorant theorists.  Clear thinking,
President Butler's and that of others,
won the day and the measures are now
well-nigh forgotten.  I mention this
as but an instance of the value to our
nation of men who have political and
historical knowledge with the ability
to think clearly upon the important
points of our social progress.

I heard President Wilson, some
months before he entered upon his
distinguished political career, address
in an informal manner a group of
University students.  He said in part
(my quotation is rather a paraphrase,
as I would not dare to transcribe from
memory the words of the most perfect
stylist of our time): "Gentlemen, in
many European countries in times of
national crises and disturbances the
nation looks to the Universities and
the question is asked, 'What do the
young men of the Universities think?'  In
America unfortunately this question
is rarely asked, as all realize that
the men at the Universities *do not think*."

This is a bitter arraignment of the
intellectual life at our universities,
and if the speaker's conclusion was
correct the same must to a great
degree be said of the intellectual life of
our nation.  The public's antipathy to
broad political matters is the most
dangerous vice that can undermine a
republic, and it is the one that is most
seriously affecting ours.  It would be
extraordinary, if it were not so
pathetic, the way in which, without
taking toll of the experience of the past,
without drawing analogies nor
seeking wisdom, we go muddling,
blundering on into the future.

That there is nothing new under the
sun is perhaps more true in matters
pertaining to political problems than
in any other branch of affairs.  History
repeats itself, repeats itself, repeats
itself, as if it never grew tired of
begging the world to learn true lessons.
In proportion as the number of our
citizens appreciate that truism and
sincerely pursue its corollaries, we
will have a sound political condition.

When Aristotle, a wise man in his
generation, said that it was in the
nature of human institutions to decay,
he knew whereof he spoke.  It is
painfully apparent to the student of
history and governments.  What were
the seeds of decay that smouldered
and finally undermined the Grecian
democracies, the power of Carthage
and of Tyre, the world-embracing
Roman Empire, the Venetian Republic,
the Holy Roman Empire, proud
Spain of Charles V, and France of
the seventeenth century?  Has the
English Empire run its course to
make way for the more vital power of
the Germanic People?  In each and
every one of these decadences, if we
wish our national life to retain its
pristine spirit, there are lessons to be
learned by the United States of
America.  Our experiment has not
necessarily met the test of time.  Our
nation is not liable to be the exception
from those that have slid down the
path to ruin.  There is a Germany,
despotic yet powerful, that perhaps
must some day be met in mortal
combat; if the danger lies not there,
perhaps it will be another.  In any case
our loins must be girt with power and
strength, our citizenship must be
hardy, our political fabric solid.

To retain our virtues, to preserve
our national life from decay, is the
responsibility upon the shoulders of our
generation.  It is for this that we must
"read and reflect on history" and
apply it directly to life.  What an
analogy may be drawn between the Roman
Usurpers in the time of the Empire's
decadence throwing money at the
street crowds to obtain their support,
and our modern politicians bidding
for the old soldier vote by passing
absurdly extravagant pension bills!
This mulct of the treasury is now on
the wane, but is the new power in
politics, the labor unions, going to
obtain legislation and favors because
it can poll a large vote upon election
day?  Such things are signs of
decadence.  Must we not learn from the
French Revolution that its failure as
a constructive force was due to an
attempt to legislate morality into
existence—and yet we continue to pass
as laws measures that have truly been
dubbed "amendments to the Ten
Commandments."  How many of the great
nations and institutions have had
their backs broken through too
excessive centralization, yet, to-day
there are but few individuals and no
political party that stand in
opposition to our ever-increasing tendency
towards federalism, in contradistinction
to community government.  Until
the outbreak of the World War,
England, Germany and Russia each had
a terrible internal problem: England
attempting to Anglicize Ireland,
Russia to Russianize Poland, Germany
to Germanize Alsace and Lorraine.
There was this thorn in the side of
each nation: by brute force they were
trying to denationalize another
country.  England was failing after three
hundred years of wasted men and
resources, Russia was covering a
volcano that had smouldered for
generations, after over forty years Germany
had as ugly a wound to nurse as in
the beginning.  Yet with these
examples, good Americans, with
confident smiles, for three years have
been laughing at the Democratic
administration on account of their
Mexican policy.  "Conquer Mexico,"
the wiseacres say.  Yes, conquer
Mexico the way England has tried and
failed to conquer Ireland!

The political value of history lies in
its disclosures of the defects that have
brought on decay, and the stumbling
blocks that make trouble.  In reading
history we must keep our eyes on the
present.  It is unreasonable to believe
that our government is an infallible
one, or that our national existence,
maintained with the most stable
governmental authority, combined with
the widest possible latitude for the
liberty of men, is any more infallible
than the many other systems that have
met with disaster in the past.  The
reading of history is valuable, in that
it enables us to have those visions of
the future that will be fruitful in that
they are moulded by our experiences
in the past.  Such visions, inculcating
power of judgment, are never more
requisite than in these days in which
the blind pacifist, the quack reformer,
the misguided theorist, and the
wide-promising demagogue are abroad in
the land.  We must study our lessons
of the past that we may spurn those
governmental cure-alls evolved,
according to Alexander Hamilton, "in
the reveries of those political doctors,
whose sagacity disdains the admonitions
of experimental instruction."

American history properly forms
the most fruitful subject of study for
Americans, and yet one must have a
wide background to obtain the proper
crop.  One must soon be led to the
investigation of our legislative,
executive and judicial functions as they
developed through the evolution of
constitutional government in England.
The democratic models traced to the
Grecian states, the seeds of
"sans-culotte" philosophy that Jefferson and
Tom Paine brought from France, the
thought of political scientists such as
Plato, Machiavel, Locke, and Montesquieu
open fields in which every reader
may learn lessons that will guide his
judgment in the ever-important
problems of the day.

A citizenship educated to a knowledge
of the past is a bulwark that will
defend the integrity of our nation.
Such a citizenship is in truth an ideal
in that it is unobtainable, but it is a
splendid ideal and one that should be
our guiding star.  In a government
such as ours it is intolerable that an
educated man should cast his vote by
habit, and yet how often do we hear
the opinion expressed that such and
such a man would vote the straight
Democratic or Republican ticket no
matter what the platform, no matter
who the candidate?  This study of
political parties is itself fruitful.  One
hundred years ago the Democratic
party was the party of decentralization
and "laissez-faire," but to-day,
since the Bryan influence has had such
sway, it eclipses the Republican party
as the exponent of centralization and
paternalism.  There are, however,
thousands of voters who continue to
vote the straight Democratic ticket,
believing that the party stands for the
same principles as it did when their
fathers first voted.  This is but an
incident of man becoming an indifferent,
incapable political animal.  Too much
of such indifference is a fatal disease
to a country of universal franchise.

History has no business in the
closet!  "History and your Vote,"
gentlemen,—and now, in several
states, you of the fairer sex,—is a
phrase worth remembering upon election day.





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   CHAPTER V


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   CLIO'S VINTAGE

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History after all is the true poetry.—CARLYLE

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To the one who drinks of the
wisdom of Clio, the Muse of history, there
will come manifold riches other than
the accrued satisfaction of
well-weighed political judgment.  A
knowledge of history, in its broadest sense,
may well be said to be the essential
foundation of all cultural education.
The movements in science, philosophy,
music, literature and the plastic arts
are all inseparably intertwined, and
they have as their controlling
background the political actions of men
and the economic forces that move
peoples.

It is as impossible to thoroughly
understand the poetry of Wordsworth,
Shelley or Byron without having
an appreciation of the political
and economic events of the French
Revolution and Napoleonic Era, as it
is to conceive of the Epics of Homer
without the Trojan War.  The music
of Bach and Haydn has as its
foundation the reasonableness in religion,
philosophy and political thought of
the eighteenth century, as the music
of Wagner and Chopin the unreason
and rampant individualism of the
early nineteenth.  The books of the
Cromwellian period reflect the
illiberality and severity of the Puritan
parliaments: the books of the Restoration
reflect the French upbringing of
Charles II.  Wars and rumors of war,
famine and years of plenty, new
discoveries and great invasions make up
the life of the world, and it is of this
life that literature and music are
made.  We could indefinitely cite
instances of the influence that history
has had upon the arts, but in this
chapter let us consider history as an art,
history as literature.

No historian who deserves the name
should write "dry" histories.  The
greatest historian is he who has an
inspired passion for delving into the
past, and the ability to interpret it in
its living, human aspects.  The
"scientific" student who considers his
mission that of arriving at the precise
facts is not an historian but a
"dry-as-dust" recorder.  He is useful,
however, in providing the material that
will enable the true historian to cast
illuminating spotlights upon the
centuries that have gone before.
Mr. William Roscoe Thayer, one of
the most distinguished of our
American historical writers, tells us that
"Hi'*story*'—let us not forget—is
five-sevenths *story*."  The historians whom
we want to read are those who tell us
the dramatic *story* of the past.
Two-sevenths of their ability should,
perhaps, be their infinite patience and
intellectual honesty in gathering,
sorting and weighing documents and other
sources of information, but the other
five-sevenths must be that ability
which is the genius of the story teller.
Someone has said that every historian
must be his own "dry-as-dust," his
own bespectacled investigator of
authentic facts,—if the rest of him is
an impassioned teller of tales we have
a supreme historian.  Gibbon, before
the days of elaborately prepared
source books, before the days of
thoroughly indexed libraries, ransacked
the learned treasuries of Europe and
Asia Minor for information; to this
infinite patience there was added in
his character the gifts of the artist
and the dreamer.  The result, after
ceaseless labor, was the monumental,
yet fascinating and comparatively
reliable, "The Decline and Fall of the
Roman Empire," a book that is
acknowledged the acme of historical
perfection.

A few months ago, a woman of
intellect, a wide traveller, an omnivorous
reader, a mother of a large family, an
efficient manager in whatever she
undertook, was asked the name of the
book that had made the most
impression upon her life.  Without a
moment's hesitation she replied,
Carlyle's "History of the French
Revolution."  Upon questioning her,
we found that she had read the two
large volumes three times, and with
each rereading there had awakened in
her the sentiments aroused by the
greatest dramatic tragedy, the most
intense human story.

Carlyle was not a scientific historian,
he did not write histories for
other historians; he wrote as one
whom God directed to put upon pages
of flame the characters, the drama, the
magnificent incidents, the cruelties,
the braveries, the cowardices, the
heroisms of "the truth that is stranger
than fiction."  It is indeed more
interesting to read of what men have
done as depicted by the historian, than
what they might have done as depicted
by the second-rate novelist!

If you have not read the "French
Revolution," read it at once!  The
author has taken the most dramatic
period in modern times and he has
treated it as it deserves.  It has the
power of tragedy, whose mission is,
according to Aristotle, "to purify the
soul through fear and terror."  Your
soul will be enlightened, you will be
made to feel, as all great history makes
you feel, that life is played upon a
wondrous highway, and that the sights
and works upon the way are of the
sort to make you live in a trembling
condition of wonder and expectancy.
The city crowds will have new
meaning: men and women, for having once
been participants in the terrible
cataclysm of one hundred and twenty
year ago, are still of the stuff to
accomplish strange deeds, and to
fulfil undreamed-of destinies.

Has it occurred to you what a
relatively small and insignificant number
of familiar acquaintances we are able
in our daily life to have?  How many
men and women do you know who have
guided the destinies of nations, led
great armies into the field, or are to
meet death in their attempts to
overthrow the tyranny of a despot or a
bigot?  In history we may meet them,
and become acquainted with their
problems and struggles.  The past is
a select drawing-room into which we
all may enter.  We may derive
inspiration from the same wells that
prompted the Crusaders to set out
time after time in their well-nigh fatal
effort to drive the Moslems from
Jerusalem; we may absorb the spirit that
moved Cromwell's Ironsides; we may
appreciate the pettiness of our own
weaknesses and vexations in
comparison with the odds against which
some of History's heroes have fought
and conquered.  It is pleasant to live
in the court of Louis XIV and to talk
with kings and princes through the
pages of St. Simon's "Memoirs"; it
is a spiritual tonic and excitement to
follow the careers of the Indian
Missionaries through Parkman's glowing
pages!  It is in truth more downright
"fun" than doing most things!

Undoubtedly it is true that
Napoleon's ruthless ambition brought
devastation to the lands that he
conquered, and sorrow to the nation
whose young men he led to the
cannon's mouth, and yet I sometimes
think that greater than the Code
Napoleon, which he instituted, is the
inspiration that his career has been to
the young men of all countries.  How
many boys have dreamed their vision
of the future when following the work
of the little Corsican, who at the age
of twenty-seven led the armies of
France across the Alps to crumple in
a series of whirlwind campaigns the
proud power of Austria.  And there
was William Pitt, the Younger, who
at twenty-four became Prime
Minister of England, one-armed and
half-blind Nelson at Trafalgar Bay,
Lincoln, the rail-splitting President,
Olive, Garibaldi, Hampden, and how
many another has been a light that
beckons our future soldiers and
statesmen?

In every epoch of history we will
find new horizons opened that will
enrich and broaden our daily life; in
every vital struggle we will find
individuals and peoples who have acted
in such a way that we should hope to
be guided by them in our struggles
and ambitions; in the failures of the
past we may obtain moral lessons for
the present and the future; in
coördinating our forces and forming our
judgments we will obtain a training
for our minds which will be of use
to every man in carrying out the
enterprises in which he is engaged.

Dr. Johnson well said that the
traveller brings from his journeys
that which he brings to them.  It is
indeed pitiful to be in Paris and to see
countless American tourists rushing
about "seeing Paris."  What a difference
there is between those who bring
to the storied city on the Seine a
familiarity with her past, and those
who bring nothing but time and money
to spend.  For the first, there are
human dramas lurking in the
shadows of Notre Dame; Quasimodo, the
strange dwarf in Hugo's great
romance, still swings on the bells of the
belfry; the narrow streets and
turbulent cafes may still contain the
instigators of the Reign of Terror and
their shouting mobs of "sans
culottes"; Camille Desmoulins may still
be visualized in the Café Royal
plucking the leaves to make his tricolor
cockade.  At every turn, in every
ancient building, there are rich
historic memories that may feed the
traveller who has prepared himself.

And the others, to whom history is
a closed book!  How barren and
incompetent are their wanderings in
Paris, London, Vienna, or any other
old world city!  To think that one can
appreciate the historic gathering
places of the human race without
having knowledge of their past is as
absurd as to believe one knows the
woods when one cannot appreciate
the beauty and wonder of the wild life
that makes of the woods its dwelling
place.  Go among the trees some day
with one who has studied and absorbed
"the woodnotes varied"!  Wander
about the Quais of Paris, or the
Temple Inns of London, with a man
who has read history with a human
interpretation, and consider upon
your return the increased wealth, you
carry in your mind!

We cannot all be travellers, but it
is always safe to store up material
against a possible future; although I
have never read far into the history
of China, and though there is little
possibility of my ever visiting the land
of ancient civilizations, I am sure I
could derive much pleasure and
obtain a better understanding of our
Occident if I followed a course of
reading upon the varied fortunes of
the different dynasties that have ruled
the richly storied Eastern nation.

Our history books teach us valuable
lessons in the art of living,—and this
is assuredly the most important of the
arts!  As a man who brings something
upon his travels besides his pocket-book
and luggage comes home with
rich experiences and memories, so
does the man who approaches life with
something more than a hungry
stomach obtain from life more than he
otherwise would.  The greater variety
of experiences we have, the more we
know of the affairs of men, the richer
our understanding of the forces that
have ruled the world, the more
replete with ecstatic living is our daily
life.  If the best of life is to be won
by living in the world keen and alive
to everything that moves, or thinks,
or glitters, a great share of riches
must go to the man who has studied
and thought in other realms than
those which immediately surround his
own dwelling house.

In Philadelphia I sometimes watch
the hurrying crowds of business men
go scurrying underneath the shadow
of Independence Hall.  I wonder if
these crowds are in any true sense
aware of the important and heroic
deeds that were accomplished in that
building.  I am sure that if they did
their movements beneath that shadow
would be rich in living experience.  At
political conventions, I sometimes
wonder whether the delegates are
aware of the vast consequence of the
long governmental tradition which
they, as delegates, have been called
upon to uphold, and I feel sure that
those who do, fulfil their responsibilities
with a quickened sense of their
weight and human moment.

On the observation car of a
twentieth-century flyer the road-bed is so
smooth, the rails so even, the power
so terrific, that the past as an
industrial development that has cast aside
the stage coach, the prairie schooner,
the pony express, makes one alive to
the romance of the present.  Down on
the beach of a popular New Jersey
summer resort when the water is
dotted black with bobbing civilized
bathers, look out over the waves and
wonder at the change of but four
hundred years.  In a moment your mind
can travel back to the Spanish castle
and see Columbus begging the gold
that would enable him to equip his
ships to sail westward into the
unknown sea.  Romance cannot be dead
so long as men work, and strive, and play.

There is an art in reading history
as there is an art in writing it.  The
writer who tells us of a battle with the
same lack of imagination as the
recorder who prepares mortality
statistics must be compared to the reader
who crams his mind full of dates and
uncoördinated facts without drawing
from them the riches and lessons of
experience.  The true historian and
the proper reader of history must find
in the past a world of enlightenment,
an enrichment that magnifies, clarifies,
and makes living the present.  It is
better to have studied a minute epoch,
the history of your county or town,
with a human understanding than to
have unintelligently digested the
careers of a hundred heroes, the
military movements in fifty campaigns.

Do not turn from the eight bulky
volumes of Gibbon's masterpiece
with the fear that they are dry and
useless, but begin them with the
determination of finding an enlightenment
to your vision of inestimable
value in "the art of living."  The
dates of battles, the names of
individuals, the data about which life
revolved, are only of value in that they
are the framework upon which you
can hang the true meaning of the
past—the evolving germ of the
present.  The Song of Solomon is not
to be read because it is the Bible, but
rather because it is a love song of
which the world can never grow
weary; Motley's "History of the
Dutch Republic" is not to be read
because it is recommended in the
schools and colleges, but because in it
you will find the unrolling of a human
drama that will quicken your pulse
and strengthen your faith in men.

Read the record of the past with the
desire of obtaining a deeper
understanding, an enlarged vision, an
inspired ideal, a rich experience, and you
will have become proficient in the art
of reading history.  You must have
often thought upon the difficulty of
determining exactly what you want.
What do you desire life and your
exertions to give you?  In reading
history perhaps you will be helped by
finding out what Christ wanted when
he died upon the cross, what the
Pilgrims wanted when they left comfort
and sailed to strange lands, what
Stanley wanted when he buried
himself in darkest Africa.  Clio has had
many wooers, from Thucydides to
Carlyle and George Trevelyan, and
their offerings form a treasure trove
which must not be neglected.





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   CHAPTER VI


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   THE POET AND THE READER

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I myself but write one or two indicative words for
   the future,
I but advance a moment, only to wheel and hurry
   back in the darkness.

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I am a man who, sauntering along, without fully
   stopping, turns a casual look upon you, and then
   averts his face,

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Leaving it to you to prove and define it,

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Expecting the main things from you.
                              WALT WHITMAN

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What is poetry to you or me, as we
rush to make the trolley car or suburban
train?  To get to the office on time
seems the main chance, and yet
returning home in the evening are we so
tired that the funny page of the
evening paper fulfils our entire intellectual
and spiritual need?  In asking
this let me ask another question.  Day
in and day out, in work and play, in
sorrow and anxiety, in pleasure and
enthusiasm, what is life worth to you
and me?  We Americans are not much
given to philosophizing about life, we
prefer to live it.  Whereas the
intelligent Russian argues about the reason
for and the meaning of action,
Americans are prone without thought to
throw themselves into the mill of
violent living, to go at top speed
until the gears break down, and then
sometimes to say with Kipling's
Galley Slave,

   |  —whate'er comes after, I have lived and toiled with Men!

Our answer to the question "What is
the meaning of life?" is simply "The
living of it."  "Work while you work,
and play while you play" may be
considered our national motto.  In short,
for every minute of our existence we
want to have "sixty seconds' worth of
distance run."  To live acutely is our
pleasure, to work our hearts out and
revel in the doing of it is our end.  It
is thus, to use an expressive phrase of
the vernacular, that "we prove
something."  And it is this fact which
strengthens the paradox that the
American, the man of action and
bustle, must draw his greatest source
of living in the realization of the spirit
of singers.

The poet is he who has drunk more
deeply at the well of experience than
has his fellow men.  Many a profound
poet never writes a verse, for when a
man of temperament is deeply moved
he writes a poem within his own heart.
It is for some to transcribe their
emotions into words whereby their
feelings may be communicated from
one man to another; but it is for
others to be without the gift of verbal
expression and the poems must
remain within.  How many times in life
is your soul afire with enthusiasm,
drunk with beauty, stricken with
sadness, or overflowing with the meaning
or portent of experience?  At those
times you are a poet, whether or not
you transcribe the reflection of your
heart upon the written page.  The man
who sings within is a singer whether
or not he gives his song verbal
utterance.  These hours of poetic ecstasy
make life a thing to be cherished.  The
sources of such ecstasy are manifold—the
love of man and woman, or
parent and children, religious
communion with the Spirit, comradeship,
work, pursuance of duty, speed,
health, beauty, the joy of the builder
or artist, attainment to a higher
understanding, sadness, hope,—from
such springs come the bubbles of the
wine of life, heartening the cherished
hours.  Our greatest poems are those
that have never been written—true
experience is poetry, and experience
is an open door to life.

   |  Yet all experience is an arch wherethrough
   |  Gleams that untraveled world, whose margin fades
   |  For ever and for ever when I move.
   |

The poetry found in books is
experience, directly or indirectly,
through the agency of verbal expression,
transferred to the printed page.
The great writers of poems are those
who have undergone spiritual experiences
of greater intensity than those
which come within the range of us
lesser mortals.  In their poems we
partake of their life, of their ecstasy in
the presence of beauty, of the richness
of their imaginings, of the depth of
their spiritual natures.

You and I, when we hear the wood
thrush sing, are moved with the music
of the notes, and are possibly carried
away into the bosky woods where the
richly patterned bird in his evening
song pours his heart to Heaven; but
when Keats hears the melody of the
nightingale, his nature so acutely
attuned to the harmony, the message
of peace and solitude, is swept away
in such an ecstasy of heartfelt
longing for that same peace, that same
solitude, that his own heart pours
forth his song, in words no less
musical, in cadences no less rich than the
notes of the feathered songster.  His
experience is preserved for us in "The
Ode to a Nightingale" and we may
read and derive the same fascination
that he felt.

Matthew Arnold somewhere tells us
that all great poetry has one or both
of two attributes: "Natural Magic"
and "Moral Profundity."  Whatever
these two phrases may mean upon first
sight, after examining their true
import it will be appreciated that the
greatest English critic did not
consider poetry a thing for the closet, or
sentimental matter only to be read by
the melancholy lovelorn to his
sentimental maid.  The effect of the
natural magic of a summer's night, of
the sea breaking upon the wind-swept
coast, of the sea gull's flight, is
apparent and valued by everyone.  What
are most holidays other than periods
during which we absorb appearances
and sensations, that enter our
personalities and remain part of ourselves
during the succeeding year of work?
"Natural Magic" is that which acts
upon us as a holiday influence,
compounded perhaps of beauty, mystery,
fear or sentiment, which for the
moment or for eternity gives our minds
entrance into a realm of new and
pleasurable things.  Read Samuel
Taylor Coleridge's "Kubla Khan"
and you will find the essence of natural
magic.  You enter a realm, indeed, of
magic and witchery, for

   |  In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
   |  A stately pleasure-dome decree:
   |  Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
   |  Through caverns measureless to man
   |  Down to a sunless sea.

Do those lines charm you?  They
charm most of us and the cadence of
the words, the confused picture of
Xanadu, have become our own,—riches
with which we would not care to part.

Every time I read them the blunt
edge of life is worn off, living regains
its sharpness, I have to an extent
experienced an ecstasy, taken a
holiday.

It is hard to define the exhilaration
of a canter across the meadows upon
a crisp October day, or the impulse
that surges through you as you look
to the ocean breathing the sea breeze,
or the sense of religious comradeship
that grips you when in the midst of
a crowd, great with a single purpose,—but
this is all of the true stuff
of Natural Magic.  Your sensations
are not of the minute, but of all time,
as they have vivified your soul and
become part and parcel of your
personality.

It is so with the poets who sing you
a song or breathe a sentiment that is
not oral, not didactic, not purposeful,
but of the stuff that thrills the spirit of
man,—their charm is impossible to
define, it must be felt, and for having felt
it, your spirit is of a color different
from what it was before.  As Corot's
landscapes painted in the forest of
Fontainebleau are said to express the
emotion of the painter when in the
presence of nature, so does the lyric
poet of magical gift express his feelings,
lay bare his soul with its emotions
and vacillations.  The sadness and
sensuous mystery of Edgar Allan Poe,
the marvellous ability of Tennyson to
fit the most exquisite words to the most
subtle incantations of beauty, the
thrill of romance in Shakespearean
England as depicted by our
contemporary, Alfred Noyes, the appetite
for sensuous delights of Keats, the
tuneful, heartfelt songs of the
Cavalier poets—these are of natural magic,
of delight to the human soul, of the
spirit of art.

When Shakespeare wrote,

   |  Where the bee sucks, there suck I:
   |  In a cowslip's bell I lie,

he had no moral to expound, he merely
sung from his heart with the beauties
of nature and the ways of fairy-land as
an open book before him.  If we wish
(and there is no rightful reason why
we should not) to drain the very dregs
of living for the richest drops of wine,
let us enrich, make more virile our
enjoyment by seeking nourishing
draughts of experience from the poets
who have expressed those sweetest
joys on earth in poems that have
cleansed the souls of men for
generation upon generation.

There is the other phrase of Matthew
Arnold, "Moral Profundity."  It is
when we seek wisdom from the poets
that we find this attribute.  When the
greatest of them give us their
innermost thought, not the record of
experiences, but the essential deductions
from all their experiences, we have
their true wisdom.  When Wordsworth
in "The Lines Composed a Few
Miles Above Tintern Abbey."  wrote
the words,

   |            Therefore am I still
   |  .....well pleased to recognize,
   |  In Nature and the language of the sense,
   |  The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse,
   |  The guide, the guardian, of my heart, and soul
   |  Of all my moral being;

or when, in his "Ode on the Intimations
of Immortality," he wrote,

   |  Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
   |  The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,
   |  Hath had elsewhere its setting,
   |  And cometh from afar:
   |  Not in entire forgetfulness,
   |  And not in utter nakedness,
   |  But trailing clouds of glory do we come
   |          From God, who is our home:

and when Shelley wrote,

   |  We look before and after,
   |  And pine for what is not:
   |  Our sincerest laughter
   |  With some pain is fraught;
   |  Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.

or when Tennyson, in "Locksley
Hall," wrote,

   |            This is truth the poet sings,
   |  That a sorrow's crown of sorrow is remembering happier things.

those men formulated in exquisite
language truths that have never been
more intensively expressed.

Probably most readers of poetry
have already considered these two
phrases, and those who have, I feel
sure, will agree that they are useful
in making for a clearer understanding
in our estimation of values.  To read
intelligently, to get the most out of
our books, we should certainly
attempt to formulate the various aspects
of life the different poets represent,
their relation to the time in which they
live, and their excellencies when they
stand before the bar of the reader's
judgment.

Very few great poets produce
poetry of but a single aspect.
Shakespeare wrote the magical fairy
jingles and yet created the stupendously
profound character of "woe-entangled
Hamlet"; Tennyson composed
many a lilting tune in words,
yet as a moralist he presented the
most sincere thought of his generation.
When we feel philosophic and
thoughtful, we turn to the poems
containing solemn truths; when weary,
jaded, and off color, we turn to the
honey of romance, the witcheries of
sensuous beauty,—and regain our lost edge.

A single phrase may have natural
magic, and yet may express a thought
for which during years of our life
we have been vainly groping.  The
poetry of thoughtful content is
probably that which has meant the most
to men, as upon the philosophy of
such religious poets as Dante or
Whitman many a man has braced his
faith; yet we must remember that
much of the wisdom of sages is
expressed in as magical language as we
have in our cherished heritage.

Let us not, however, be academic
about our poets, let us not balance one
against the other, let us not be
carping about metre, subject matter and
critical phrases, let us go to them for
what they can give towards making
this world a more marvellous place
in which to dwell.

If Kipling makes you feel the glory
of work, of the hard, terrific work in
which we rejoice, if he gives you the
call of the road, the wanderlust, and you hear,

   |   —the song—how long! how long!
   |  Pull out on the trail again!

if Bobbie Burns with his songs of
Scotia gives you a human sympathy
with mankind, an appreciation that
for all his foibles and impossibilities
"a man's a man for a' that"; if Byron
fills your heart with the divine
discontent that in a sweep of glory lands
you above and beyond the commonplaces
of every-day existence; if
Wordsworth makes you see Nature as
you have never seen her before, if he
makes a meadow of buttercups
appear in a new light, with unsuspected
meaning, with hitherto unseen color
and grace; if Keats attunes your heart
to a deeper appreciation of a form, a
fragrance, a musical harmony; if
Milton's solemn cadences inspire you
with the depth of that great Puritan's
spirit; if Shakespeare unbares your
own character in revealing the inner
springs of his eternal heroes; if
Longfellow in "My Lost Youth" brings
back to you the home of your boyhood,
and you see again

   |  The sheen of the far-surrounding seas,
   |  And islands that were the Hesperides
   |      Of all my boyish dreams;—

if you can say with Walt Whitman,

   | Logic and sermons never convince;
   |  The damp of the night drives deeper into my soul;

or if there is a man unknown except
for one poem that still stirs you with
the sentiments that you love and
honor—if these, I say, have thus met
your requirements, each and all of
them are *great* poets to you, they have
opened a door to a life richer in
content, deeper in import, more vastly
worth living.

There is no danger that the poets
will ever be in need of readers.  The
musical expression of thought or
sentiment is as old and fundamental
as is human nature.  The sailors
singing their chants as they pull in their
anchor, the negro laborers whom we
have seen singing a song as they
unload the railroad ties, or put the heavy
rails in place, the Western range rider
calming the steers, and quieting his
own nerves through the lone night
watches, the sagas and harvest songs
of simple people in all lands, are facts
that establish the part that poetry
plays in the workings of the human
heart.  In reading poetry you will
obtain no credit for upholding a
tradition, as the tradition will stand of its
own vitality; but in *not* reading it you
will miss one of the most bounteous
sources of inspiration, you will pass
by the richest treasure house, you will
neglect the supreme opportunity for
a thorough life that the art of man
has put within your reach.  When you
do read, do it for all time, not for a
moment.  If the muse is to give you of
her best, you must feel after sharing
her store as did Wordsworth when he
heard the Highland Reaper singing,

   |  For old, unhappy, far-off things,
   |  And battles long ago:

as he tells us,

   |  The music in my heart I bore,
   |  Long after it was heard no more.
   |

The poem but begins after you have
read it—the experiences that come
after are the ones that count.  Let
us remember the simile and hold the
music in our hearts as a reservoir of
powerful beauty that will carry us
over the stupid, the heavy, the
unpoetic bumps of the days' doings.





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.. _`THE CHILDREN OF PAN`:

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   CHAPTER VII


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   THE CHILDREN OF PAN

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   |  For I'd rather be thy child
   |  And pupil, in the forest wild,
   |  Than be the king of men elsewhere,
   |  And most sovereign slave of care;
   |  To have one moment of thy dawn,
   |  Than share the city's year forlorn.
   |                          THOREAU

.. vspace:: 2

The enthusiastic nature poetry of
James Thompson, called "The Seasons,"
came as a shock to that inbred
lover of the city streets, the taverns
and town activities, Doctor Samuel
Johnson.  In these poems, the Doctor
found that natural objects which
before had hardly been worthy of
attention were made to appear beautiful.
We must believe that after having
read "Spring," "Summer,"
"Autumn," and "Winter," upon his
infrequent excursions beyond the
environs of the great metropolis he saw
new beauties in the hitherto
common-place landscapes, responded to the
color in the fields and hedgerows,
became interested in fantastic cloud
effects, heard music in the streams, the
waterfalls and in the songs of birds.
For how many of us have arisen
new sources of joy in Nature's
beauteous wonderland at the instigation
of poets, essayists and novelists
who have seen and read with loving eyes

   |  Of this fair volume which we World do name.
   |

In an ardent conversation upon the
power of certain poets a friend told
me that the Anglo-Saxon world looked
at Nature through Wordsworth's
spectacles.  He maintained that the
reaction of nature upon even those
who have never read a poem by this
poet was influenced by his poetry;
Wordsworth's interpretation of
Nature had so permeated nineteenth
century religion and literature that it
was impossible for even the casual
newspaper reader to escape it.  We
do not directly acknowledge our debt,
but the garden clubs, the bird-study
societies, the surburbanite who
throughout the year will spend an
hour and a half in the train, in order,
on the way to the station in the early
morning, to obtain the pleasures of
Nature's awakening, and her retirement
upon his return at twilight, and
the Saturday afternoon golfer who,
after holing his ball, looks beyond the
course at the green whispering woods
and rolling hills, expands his chest
and murmurs "This is the life," are
all unconsciously paying part tribute
to the poet who wrote,

   |  The world is too much with us; late and soon,
   |  Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:
   |  Little we see in Nature that is ours.
   |

We need a love of nature to-day, as
we have never needed it before.  In
the terrific complexity and speed of
our external existence we crave the
quiet, internal stimulus to meditation
and dreams that comes from the Great
Mother's intricate, manifold, yet
untempestuous method of doing things.
From the close hatches of the city
where the noise, the smells, and the
turmoil seem all man-made, we must
get away to the fields and blossoming
pastures to find our souls alone with
ourselves and the Great God Pan.  To
those who answer the call of the wild,
or even the call of the suburban
garden, there come new strength and
new conceptions of beauty, to apply
to the work of the world to which we
have lent our hand.  The call is being
answered,—man goes back to his own.
We see it on every side: no one in any
walk of life seems so humble or
satisfied not to desire some day to own a
farm; most summer resorts where
there were formerly many a
"flanneled fool" have now become
"Adamless Edens," for our young men have
answered the call of the Red Gods,
and have packed their kits for the trail
that leads to the tall timbers of
solitude, of balsam, of camp fires and
dreams.

Any book or poem that gives you a
keener appreciation of the crimson of
the sumach, the whispers of the wild
things, the glory of the sunrise or of
the all-embracing broadmindness of
Nature, will have done its part
towards bringing literature into perfect
accord with life.  If my friend speaks
truly in saying that Wordsworth has
influenced two nations' outlook upon
the world, those poems, laughed at by
some for their quiet simplicity, have
indeed arisen to the highest realm of
literature and have become soul of our
soul, mind of our mind, flesh of our
flesh.

There are others—Wordsworth is
not alone in his glory.

Henry David Thoreau, the perfect
child of a cross country ramble, is my
favorite.  To write immortal words,
it is said that a man must have an
immortal passion, whether it be for
beauty, or his God, his neighbor, his
country, his lady, or himself.  Thoreau
sunk the love of all else in his
passionate devotion to Nature.  His Journals,
kept year by year with ever a spontaneous
freshness, are little else than
an ecstatic love song dedicated to his
mate,—the lake, the woods, the fields,
the apple orchards, the winds, the
colors, the birds, and all that lived
and grew about his haunts near
Walden.  A lover sees a beauty in his
lady's eye to which all the world is
blind, and Thoreau senses a magic in
an awakening Spring to which the
senses of us lesser mortals are
comparatively blunt.

His sincerity of appreciation was
one with his marvellous power of
observation.  He did not have the
scientific attitude of mind as had that
fascinating Frenchman, Fabre, who
wrote the biographies of insects in a
way that makes you tremble at the
wonders that go into the making of the
life of a fly.  Thoreau would have
scorned the aquarium and cage
methods of Fabre, not because of the
lack of interest in the results, but
rather on account of his love of
Nature, naked, wild, and free.  Upon the
shortest ramble he saw myriad
happenings, from the unusual frost
crystal upon the web of a spider to
the most subtle changing with the
varying temperature of a bird's note;
but it is all discovered without the
microscope, without thought of
entomological or ornithological records.  A
man should be afraid to say that the
woods are a dreary place in which to
walk upon a winter's day—let him
read a page from the Winter Journal
of our author and he will find that the
book of Nature is never closed for
him who has an eye in focus for her
mystic letterings.

I say that Thoreau is my favorite
and how could I deny it, since there
is many a winter's day in the city when
I am sick of the asphalt and the
bricks, and yet unable to leave them,
that I can turn to any one of his pages
and be carried by his words to my
favorite woods or stream, to the
longed-for fields and roadways?  And
in other seasons when time is more
prodigal, and nature so bounteous
that there seems to be a glut upon the
market, my senses, that might grow
befogged, are given a tonic in a
paragraph that makes the drowsy summer
atmosphere seem pregnant with
beauty and fascination.  If you are
cooped among the chimneys and
elevated trains, Thoreau will bring you
to the country—if in the country, he
will multiply the pleasures of your
walk, your ride, or fishing trip.  He
stimulates the best of life that is in
you, and that is all we can ask of any
literature.

Nature from one point of view or
another has always been one of the
chief inspirations of the poets.  If
you examine the literature of the
human race since the days when
Solomon sang "And the voice of the
turtle is heard through the land," you
will find the various aspects of the
seasons, the songs of the individual
birds, the beauty and sentiment of
flowers, and even the habits of the
different species of fish, continually
reflected in prose and verse.  America
has been especially blest with men we
must term literary naturalists.  We
have spoken of Thoreau, but there are
also Audubon, Wilson and our elderly
contemporary, John Burroughs.

Wilson and Audubon are especially
famous for their magnificent colored
plates of the birds of North America,
but I ask all nature lovers to go to a
public library and secure the prose
works of these two great ornithologists.
There you will find as interesting
reading as will come to your hand
in many a day.  They were both
pioneers in science, art and exploration;
both children of nature, more at
home in the forest than in the city;
both enthusiastic, thrilled worshippers
of their feathered friends whom
they have so brilliantly preserved in
their cherished portfolios.  Because
their work was accomplished one
hundred years ago, before our birds were
charted and when journeys of
scientific exploration, even into the
mountains of Pennsylvania, were made
with almost the same difficulty as is
now caused in the exploration of the
most jungled South American river,
the naïve spirit of the explorer, of the
elemental pioneer, is in their every
page.  There is ever the surprise, the
uncertainty, the joy of life and study
among unknown and untrammelled
things.  Theirs was the joy of
children who for the first time discover a
blackbird's nest in the far-off meadow
and their joy is communicated to us;
we become children of delight, as when
lying upon bur backs on the edge of a
flowery field of clover we watch with
fascination the darts of kingbirds
dashing from the top of the nearby
chestnut after the myriad insects.

John Burroughs, whose essays have
been a joy upon many an evening and
a stimulating remembrance upon
many a tramp, with a similar
freshness and unworldliness carried on the
tradition of the earlier men.  From
his fruit farm upon the Hudson he
continually sends us messages to
forget our tea parties, our moving
pictures, our country clubs, and really to
find ourselves in the discoveries of
beauties and life in the growing,
nesting, and flowering things about us.
One of the happy thoughts that we
derive from him is the knowledge that
to obtain the beneficence to soul and
mind we (poor suburbanites tied to
the necessity of earning our daily
bread in the city) need not follow the
"Long Trail" to the ends of the world
of the furious globe trotter, Rudyard
Kipling, but must only take store of
the things at hand, find the same
happiness in the quiet, civilized,
thoroughbred-cattled meadow as we would hope
to find up against a rugged blow in
the Northern Seas off the coast of
which "you've lost the chart of
overside."  You do not have to go so far
from home to know the world.  Thoroughly
know the garden that you cultivate,
study all that happens along
the hedgerow upon the way to the
station, and you will be richer than he
who has racketed with half blind eyes
from the Yukon to Patagonia,

   |  Or East all the way into Mississippi Bay,
   |  Or West to the Golden Gate.
   |

In conjunction with the reflection of
nature in books, I mentioned our scaly
friends, the fish, without paying due
homage to the king of all philosophic
fishermen, Izaak Walton.  How many
devotees of the gentle art of angling
have made of their own the wisdom,
the beauty, the thoughtful content of
the fisherman's classic, "The
Compleat Angler"?  A man once said to
me that the next best thing to taking
a walk was to read the accounts of
Walt Whitman's rambles upon
Timber Creek.  I answered that upon
the days you could not go a-fishing,
you had best read "The Compleat
Angler."  I hold to this!  Will not
the men who stand by the trout, the
bass, the salmon, the weak fish, or the
gallant tuna and tarpon, and the boys
who put their faith in the catfish, the
sucker, the eel, or the perch, fall in
together and be one in believing as the
Venerable Izaak believed,

   |  O the gallant fisher's life,
   |  It is the best of any!
   |  'Tis full of pleasure, void of strife,
   |  And 'tis beloved by many;
   |  Other joys
   |  Are but toys;
   |  Only this
   |  Lawful is;
   |  For our skill
   |  Breeds no ill,
   |  But content and pleasure.
   |

There is many another writer who
opens the door to the traveller who
wishes to enrich his enjoyment of
Nature as it is to be seen along life's
highway.  I mention but a few who
may give you new worlds for which
you would not trade a mint of silver.
Have you ever gone with Stevenson
upon his walking trips?  If not, do so,
and perhaps you will agree with him
that it is pleasant to have a companion
upon your journeys; as Lawrence
Sterne expresses it: "Let me have a
companion of my way were it but to
remark how the shadows lengthen as
the sun declines."  If you prefer to
be alone, Hazlitt will tell you that no
companion is necessary, as thoughts
need no companions: "I want to see
my vague notions float like the down
of the thistle before the breeze, and
not to have them entangled in the
briars and thorns of controversy."

Or have you read the books of the
Homer of the Insects, the Frenchman
I have mentioned, Fabre?  There is a
treat ahead of you—he wrote of the
crawling, burrowing and flying things
of his beloved Provence, and if there
is anything in this realm more
interesting than his records of observing
the daily lives of the House Fly, the
Praying Mantis, and many another
beetle, cricket and creeper, I have yet
to find it.  To say that you must
immediately line your room with
aquariums, jars, and boxes, in which
to preserve and watch the births, loves
and deaths of all the spiders, whirligigs,
and butterflies that come within
your reach is relating the result in
its mildest form that this author has
had upon me.  Such books introduce
you to a thousandfold intensity of
existence, as every great book must.

Intensive agriculture is heralded as
the saving factor of human progress.
Let us make a plea for truly intensive
living.  As the crops that come from
a rich, well-cultivated soil are bountiful,
so is the life that is the product of
a fertile mind.  A poor crop is a
superficial existence of discontented
pleasures and shallow unhappiness; a rich
crop is a life in which the heart and
mind are at least attune to the joy
which may be derived from the living
of it,—brave when courage is needed,
patient when patience is a virtue.  The
word "culture" is sometimes derided
as a synonym for pretentious
high-browism, but let us remember that
the farmer respects the word "cultivate,"
as he knows that it is necessary
if he wishes to make the harvest a
season of happiness and rich reward.
A man's harvest season is his every
minute of existence—his bounty is the
depth and pleasure of that existence.
Our future life is or is not a "great
perhaps," but our present life is
assuredly a reality.  It is *here*—what
are you going to do with it?  If you
can make every day a day of intense
interest you have won the greatest
battle!  You have stormed the world's
richest citadel!  The Children of Pan,
who have loved and written of
Nature, charm and transport you to a
world of infinite interest.  They offer
rich fertilizer that gives promise of a
bumper crop—Open that Door into
their Realm.





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   CHAPTER VIII


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   MEN BEHIND BOOKS

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   |  Every word man's lips have uttered
   |  Echoes in God's Skies.
   |              ADELAIDE A. PROCTER

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Books contain the accumulated
store of human thought and scientific
attainment—this is a treasure
without which there would be no
civilization—yet in addition, we may say
that the most potent inheritance, that
books vouchsafe, is the personalities
of the great authors who have
inscribed their souls within them.
Personal character affects our lives as
does nothing else.  In the back of the
mind of every one there are men and
women who, we appreciate, have been
the makers of our souls.  Most often
it is a mother or a father, sometimes a
teacher of our youth, or a friend and
fellow worker of whose nature we
realize we have absorbed a part.
Contact between human personalities is
the most profound mover for good and
evil.  A preacher may declaim against
sin for ever and a day, but you know
that your great friend who scorns sin
has infinitely more influence upon you.
The greatest doers of good are men
and women who lead others by the
examples of their own lives.  It is
unfortunately not given to many to
come into intimate personal contact
with the most supreme human souls,
but fortunate we are that many have
extended their personalities without
limit into the future, by truly
encasing themselves in books that will
remain as the leaven and inspiration of
all ages and all peoples.

I have a number of volumes upon
my shelves that I choose to consider
not as books, but as men.  Instead of
printed pages, cloth bindings, and
labels, they are living personalities
with whom I can pass an evening.  The
reading is over, and I have within me
the character of a great human being.
As have my Mother and Father and
the old fisherman, whose knowledge of
the sea and storm beaten coast fed
my boyish spirit, they have become
part of me.  The greatest books are
those that present the greatest men.
It is not the artistry of telling a story
or writing a poem that really counts;
the sincerity and intensity with which
a man, whom we may call our "guide,
philosopher and friend," is revealed
forms the most cherished treasure of
our bookshelf.  In sorrow, in
dejection, in need of mental or spiritual
sustenance, when the joy of living is
blunted, when lazy, discouraged or
annoyed, you can go to these great
fellows, converse with them and return
again to the world with a bird's-eye
view, an enlarged vision, a quickened
spirit.

Have you read Walt Whitman?
*There* is a glorious human being—so
magnificent, so all-embracing in his
love, so turbulent, so large in his
personality that to know him, to feed
upon him, you must become submerged
in his book, his soul,—"The
Leaves of Grass."  Of this volume
containing his poems he himself said,

   |  This is no book;
   |  Who touches this, touches a man.

You do indeed touch a man!  A great
spirit who saw in all things God; a
Democrat who saw in all men the
spark of the divine; a leader who
raced out to the farthest reaches of
the soul and beckons and begs you
to follow; a lover who embraced all,
the prostitute, the poet, the lowly,
the exultant, Christ himself, in a
spirit of human fellowship; a physical
giant who gloried in his sex and makes
you consider sacred the relationship
of the sexes; a nurse who brought
upon himself paralysis by caring for
the wounded in the Civil War; a
prophet who could no more believe
that the spirit of an individual man
could die than that it had never been
born.  Perhaps you think I write
extravagantly—I do not—I but attempt
to present what the personality of
Walt Whitman has meant to me, and
to many, many others.  I but ask that
you go to the "Leaves of Grass," and
come in contact with that man to
whom so many look and say—"A
great part of myself is you, Walt
Whitman!  My life has been renewed
since first I touched your hand."

Tolstoy!  There is another one who
believed in humanity and God,—there
is another who has put a huge, rugged,
loving soul within books.  Probably
no one has so influenced the
humanitarianism of our day as did this
bearded old warrior from Russia;
but it was the deep human sympathy
of the actual living Tolstoy that moved
the world, not the arguments he
deduced nor the warnings he gave.  He
was always a moralist,—even in his
masterpiece "Anna Karenina" it is
not the story he tells, but the human
love which he reveals that has made
the eternal monument.  Afraid of
nothing,—the Czar, convention,
hatred, oppression,—he lived his life
according to the dictates of his own
conscience, the most punishing conscience
that has ever been the attribute of a
master soul.  If you do not know him,
read his short story "Master and
Man."  There you will find enunciated,
in a manner as poignant, as powerful,
as even that of the Sermon on the
Mount, the doctrine of happiness
found in living your life for others.
Selfishness, pride, materialism, the
sins that spoil the world, cannot stand
in the way of the burning words of
Tolstoy.  Your conscience will
receive a stiffening medicine, your
sympathies for the sins and sufferings
of your neighbors will deepen to bed
rock, and your life will become
proportionately more true, more happy,
more Christian.  Six years ago in
the lowly hut near the Caucasus,
when the mighty soul of Tolstoy left
the body, the World missed a leader, a
lover, a prophet—but his word still
remains, and the doctrine as told by
him of universal betterment through
love and human sympathy will reach
mankind whilst there are men left to
read, and to communicate.

We all know the poems of Robert
Burns, most of us know something of
his life.  His life and character are
revealed in his poetry.  He too was a
lover, but a weak rather than a rugged
one.  We love him for his very
weakness.  His heart was his strength and
his undoing.  He loved until his heart
would break, ruthlessly and
impetuously, and of his sufferings, his
remorses, regrets, and forlorn hopes he
sang.  In this cruel world, where
might so often makes right, what a
benediction it is to read a poem
written from the depth of a simple,
sorrowing, yet deeply human heart
upon the suffering that he has caused
the "wee sleekit, cow'rin, tim'rous
beastie" in turning up her nest with
the plowshare.  As with all the
personalities that are "great" in the
deepest sense, his was one that felt a
companionship for all that lives upon
the earth, and from his sympathy for
the drunken, the heart-broken, and
the meadow mice, and his joy in
patriotism, true lovers, and beauteous
roses, we derive a depth of sentiment
that needs must mellow our hearts.  A
brave spirit in a weak body had
Bobbie Burns—he drank and was
unfaithful, but he felt deeply.  We love
him for his depth, we sympathize with
him in his weaknesses.  As a friend
he purifies rather than stimulates our
souls, but he is a true friend and a
loving one.

François Villon, the greatest ballad
singer of all time, the tavern lover,
the vagabond, the heavy-hearted
sorrower, the lighted-hearted laugher,
the bosom companion of thieves,
cut-throats, chattering grisettes, old
courtesans, rioters, and brawlers of the
narrow streets, Cathedral shadows,
Seine banks of mediæval Paris, was
another of those great-hearted human
lovers who had the gift of telling his
heart secrets in words of wondrous
beauty.  By twentieth century standards
Villon's actions, thieveries, and
suspected murder, would have been
neither moral nor proper, but by the
standard of all ages, in all true hearts,
his feelings towards the people among
whom he moved will stand the test of
the most austere morality.  He loved
all men and women for the best that
was in them, he did not scorn them
for the worst.  He was unselfish and
true to his friends, and more than that
we cannot desire.  Where there is
hypocrisy there is vice; where there is
selfishness there is lack of Christianity
and humanity; our tavern poet,
François Villon, had neither of these,
and if you want a friend who will
make you see the good in the bad, the
beautiful in the ugly, go to your
bookshelf and become acquainted with the
fervid soul of this ancient ballad
singer.

When you are too contented, when
your mind feels squidgy with good
living, or sultry from the summer
heat, go to another man,—George
Gordon, Lord Byron.  They say that
Byron (with Scott) is nowadays out
of fashion.  "They" are mistaken.
The author of Childe Harold and Don
Juan will never be truly out of fashion,
so long as there is a flare in youthful
hearts, a discontent in ambitious
minds.  He is the poet of a great
revolt, a kicker at the traces, and then
again he is the singer of the bleeding
heart, of lost causes; he hurries you
across the seas upon his speeding
bark; he tops the crags of human
loneliness and leaves you desolate.  His
songs are of the rollicking wine of
life with its excitements, its depressions,
its sentiments of hatred, beauty,
joy.  For youth he is the poet of
liberty, of intense individualism; for
age the poet of thwarted desires, for
everyone he has a chestnut burr to
put beneath dull content; his mockery
is for stupidity, dryness, stagnation.
Get under the crust of his effusive
egotism and you will meet a sombre,
lonely, sensitive individual, who needs
you as a friend and who will be to you
a hypodermic stimulative.

How different a one from this poet
is his contemporary, the essayist,
Charles Lamb.  The essays we love the
best are those that reveal the point
of view, the little personalities of the
writer, and no man of letters ever had
a more magnetic personality, or knew
better how to preserve himself in little
literary gems, than did the author of
"The Essays of Elia."  Lamb spent
his days in the South Sea Counting
House transferring figures from one
great ledger to another.  But his
evenings with his books, his family and
his friends!  Ah!—there was a
companion!  A booklover whose
enthusiasm, for musty duodecimos has
become a classic allusion, a punster
whose puns are sometimes good and
sometimes bad, but always original, a
relisher of good conversation, a man
of many petty weaknesses, a lover of
good food, with a taste for old wine,
and with an infinite appreciation of
the fads and foibles of himself and
others, he seems to have been
altogether the most lovable individual
with whom it would be possible to
scrape up an acquaintance.  Read but
one hundred pages of his essays and
he becomes your chuckling, appreciative,
inimitable companion.  Every
old book shop, every roast pig, every
glass of rich wine, every threadbare
clerk stooping over his ledger—these
and many such will take on fresh and
romantic aspects for the friend of Elia.

Thomas Carlyle was an historian
and philosopher who wrote his name
over every page of his work.  His was
the voice and the soul of the Old
Testament prophets, who railed at men
from the depths of their bitter yet
anxious hearts.  The Preacher of the
Nineteenth Century, when he spoke
the world listened!  Have you read
"Sartor Resartus"?  Among his
works this is even the most personal.
It is rough and jagged in style,
turbulent and confused in arrangement,
but behind it all, or rather under it
all, is revealed the spiritual message
to his age.  The message is Carlyle's
own personality: his bravery, his
sincerity, his fine hatred of muddle-headed
thinking, of credulity, of cant;
his love and admiration for the
fundamental greatnesses of human
nature, his belief in an omnipotent
God.  He wished men to believe, and
the thunder he bellowed in his
endeavor still resounds.  His soul was
a battery of twelve-inch guns directed
against the forces of ignorance and
hypocrisy.  It is to the reading of
"Sartor Resartus" that many men
point as the turning stake in their
spiritual lives.  It was not in the book
that they found their spiritual
bulwarks, but in the soul of the great
Scotchman with whom they came in
contact.

There is our own Emerson, whose
admiration for Carlyle was probably
only outdone by Carlyle's admiration
for him!  "Self Realization," "The
American Scholar," "Friendship,"
"Politics"—how many of his essays
have become part and parcel of
America's loftiest thought and action.
The metallic acuteness of his
personality was not of the kind with which
you can become familiar, but its very
aloofness holds our respect and
devotion.  The austerity of George
Washington in public life can only be
compared with the cold distance at which
this philosopher holds us, and yet
upon their pedestals we recognize
them as men from whom the best in
American character has derived
nourishment.  In every sentence of his
every essay, we feel the soul at peace,
the intellect enthroned, the power of
will predominant.

A man without friends is a man
without life, and I have but told you
of some of my boon companions.
Never to have shared in the fellowship
of the great spirits who are
preserved for us in books is to cut one's
self off from the most rewarding of
human relationships.  The chums of
our boyhood, our companions at
college, too often drift away to distant
parts, or diverge from us in pursuits
other than our own; although
remembrances of our times together are
sacred and of sweet recalling, too
often they are of the past and renewal
forever impossible.  The friends of
our books, however, are forever with
us, they cannot die, they cannot
depart, they remain fresh and vigorous,
hearty sojourners upon our road,
forever willing to lend a hand over the
rocks and bumpy places.  Without
disparaging those with whom I sit
before the fire, and chat, and smoke, I
must confess that I value equally with
them the friends of eternal character
that exist there in the book-case.  They
lighten the path of life; they are ready
for converse when my spirit calls.

Go to the greatest books for your
most enduring friends, but upon
having formed their friendship do not
leave them in the study, but carry
them within your spirit to your
business and the marts of men, and in
holding their confidences burning in
your heart you will find yourself a
more thorough human being.





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.. _`KEEPING UP WITH LIFE`:

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   CHAPTER IX


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   KEEPING UP WITH LIFE

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Reading is the key which admits us to the whole
world of thought and fancy and imagination, to the
company of saint and sage, of the wisest and
wittiest at their wisest and wittiest moments.  It
enables us to see with the keenest eyes, to hear with
the finest ears, and to listen to the sweetest voices of
all time.

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JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL

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If in the minds of some readers this
little book has helped to break down
the futile distinctions and to show the
real relation between the man who
reads and the one who enjoys life,
between the thinker and the man of
action, it has done all that the author
dared hope.  Let us look upon our
library not as an end in itself, but as a
means to an end.  It is a mistaken
ambition to read as many books as
possible within a year, or to attempt
religiously to read the complete works
of a number of authors.  The man who
buries himself in his library and exists
only in the books therein is an
unsocial, stagnant creature; but the one
who reads as a means of attaining to
a more productive life among his
fellow men is the one who has gained the
true riches of literature.

The world is a world for workers,
not idlers.  We live in America in the
twentieth century, and we are of but
little use to the general machinery if
our minds are forever sojourning with
the mediæval knights or gossiping in
the by-ways of London with Charles
Lamb and his contemporaries.
Literature for you and me who live, and
toil, and hope to obtain joy in the
doing of it, must be vivifying
nourishment to apply to our living and
toiling.  Great books and all true
education provide this nourishment
or else they would not be worth the
price of a comic supplement.

Poetry, fiction, philosophy and
history are not alone for old maids and
retired business men who desire
comforting, amusing solace to while away
the hours until the race is run, nor
alone for college professors and
writers whose business it is to read,
abstract, and judge,—they are truly,
have been, and always will be for the
minds of men and women who need
and use the spirit of them in their
work, their play, their sorrows, and
their joys.

When Francis Bacon wrote "Reading
maketh a full man," he did not
mean "full" to imply a great
accumulation of facts and dry-as-dust
learning.  Bacon was a philosopher,
scientist, essayist, of the first order in each,
and yet a leading statesman in his
age.  His mind was "full" in that he
had probably as had no other man in
England absorbed all the literature
and science of all the centuries that
had preceded him; his was the fulness
of the reservoir from which could be
drawn an endless stream of resource
with which to undertake new political
enterprises, of strength to maintain
his position and of philosophy in the
face of losing it.  He was a literary
man in that he knew the literature of
the world, a man of letters—he wrote
masterpieces, a man of action—he
virtually ruled Great Britain.  This
is the threefold thread of life that we
may all have as our ambition,—the
connoisseur, the creative artist, the
productive worker.

After having considered the bearing
the reading of books has upon life,
let us consider the bearing that living
has upon reading and writing.  Elbert
Hubbard carried out this thought in
his little book upon William Morris,
the English poet.  Morris, as you may
know, was a weaver, a blacksmith, a
wood-carver, a painter, a dyer, a
printer, a furniture manufacturer, a
musician, and withal a great poet.
Hubbard said: "William Morris
thought literature should be the
product of the ripened mind."  We have
looked at Bacon as one whose literary
output must have been the product of a
mind that had manfully grappled with
worldly affairs, and here is a further
list that the Roycrofter gives us:
"Shakespeare was a theatre manager,
Milton a secretary, Bobbie Burns a
farmer, Lamb a bookkeeper,
Wordsworth a Government employee,
Emerson a lecturer, Hawthorne a
custom-house inspector, and Whitman a
clerk."

The professional man of letters,
except in rather rare instances, is by no
means the man who erects the most
enduring literary monuments.
Literature must come from elemental life
to have the true relationship to the
affairs of men.  We could increase
Elbert Hubbard's list to an almost
indefinite length—the author of the
Gettysburg address had the weight of
a nation upon his shoulders, Thoreau
was more interested in observing the
changing seasons than he was in
writing books, Tolstoy was a soldier, an
economist and farmer, Balzac an
unsuccessful publisher, Bunyan a
preacher, Pepys a high government
official, Oliver Wendell Holmes a
doctor, and countless novelists and
poets of the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries hard-working, hard-driven
newspaper men.

Leisure does not make great
literature,—all that is effective must come
from interior or exterior experiences,
and acute observations.  The most
effectual reading is that which is done
in the light of personal experience,
with one's eye upon unliterary
activity.  There is an endless chain, of
which the links are the subject, the
artist, the reader and his life as
reflected by the author's treatment.  To
live in a world of books and to have as
their profession the spinning of other
volumes is the life of too many of our
writers.  On the other side of the
shield, we of course see readers whose
lives are entirely absorbed in the
volumes they read without an outlet
to the practical activities of existence.
How tiresome it is to have a
bustling man or woman tell us that they
have not the time or that they are not
literary enough to read great books.
They of course, being good Americans,
have plenty of time to go through
stacks of worthless novels, and absorb
a half dozen continuous serial stories
in our monthly magazines.  I say it
is tiresome, and it is foolish, as with a
moment's thought we can realize that
books are essentially for the man or
woman who is most deeply immersed
in life.

Break down the barrier between
literature and life?—there is none!  I
have a certain friend who has more to
do within the twenty-four hours of
the day than has anyone else I know.
Politics, municipal corporations,
railroads—these are apparently his
life—absorbed in men and affairs.  And yet
if I run across a book that especially
appeals to me, I go to him and ask his
ideas upon it.  He has probably read
it and with his greater experience in
the actual turmoil of living than I
have had, he can enlighten me with a
dozen new points of view upon the
book under consideration.  He interprets
it in the light of his experience,
as the author had written in the light
of his.

It was said that during President
Wilson's first winter in the White
House, society in Washington was
much exercised as to how he passed
his evenings.  It later developed that
those evenings in which he was not
absorbed in official business were
spent in reading poetry, preferably
Wordsworth, to his family.
Washington stood amazed!  Perhaps there
is no truth in this story, but the
ingredients are certainly there, which,
if brought into conjunction, would
make a true yarn.  The active
helmsman of the ship of state, with
innumerable matters weighing upon him,
seeking wisdom and spiritual fibre
from a great poet; Washington
society, without much to do, yet
frightfully busy, amazed at his wasting or
dreamily passing his hours of possible
recreation!

Many another great public man has
well appreciated that books are not
for the closet but for life.  Theodore
Roosevelt is the apostle of strenuosity,
statesman, ranchman, hunter, and yet
a writer upon a wide range of
subjects and an omnivorous reader.  The
plays of Shakespeare were the school
books and college education of our rail
splitter, Abraham Lincoln.  A great
English liberal, Charles James Fox,
would charm the House of Commons
for hours with his oratory, go to
Brooks' and lose a fortune at cards,
and then home to his bed to read the
Plays of Euripides,—probably to
absorb wisdom and courage for his
thinking and gaming upon the
following evening.  Of the men and women
to whom books mean life, we could
go on with our list indefinitely, not
only through the ranks of kings and
queens, soldiers and statesmen,
financiers and merchants, but sea captains,
mechanics, farmers, clerks, and coal
miners.  In every walk of life we find
the true philosophers, the true adepts
in the art of living, seeking sustenance
from the printed page.

Go into a public library, and study
the faces of those who are reading
there—ambition, inspiration, delight
will be expressed by those who have
found *the open door*, the way to riches
and plenty.  Observe the homes of
your acquaintances!  Cicero said that
books are the soul of a room, and we
may expand this epigram in saying
that the use of books in a family
brings all the members into a
communion with each other, creating an
atmosphere far removed from that of
the home in which books are
infrequent sojourners.

Oh no, it is not the professed
gentleman of literature with the pedantic
knowledge and bookish phraseology,
but the men and women who seek
explanation of and relief from
sorrow, stimulus to higher attainment,
pleasure that mellows activity, to
whom the authors are truly the path
of life.  Those whom you see on the
elevated trains reading Shakespeare,
the ranchman with his pocket edition
of Dickens, the country doctor who
hates to buy an automobile as when
driving his old buggy he could read
his Boswell upon his round of visits,—they
are the ones to whom the poet can
truly say,

   |  You will hardly know who I am, or what I mean;
   |  But I will be health to you nevertheless,
   |    And filter and fibre your blood.
   |

You need never be afraid of becoming
intellectual.  To be sure it is
somewhat the fashion in America to think
that a man who reads Meredith
should be a college professor or the
editor of a book review—but this is
only a fashion and held to by the most
stupid.  It is smart to laugh at good
books and "culture," but it is the same
sort of smartness at which all Europe
has been sensibly sneering for a
century.  Reading should not be a
profession; those that make it such
invariably become world weary, book
weary, at sea in an ocean in which life
is necessarily a more vital thing than
they are able to swallow.  Do not give
your life over to your library, but
make of it an electric battery with
which to vivify life.  It can be done,
and is done by the great and the little,
the sorrowful and the joyful, the leading
warriors in the battle for civilized
progress.

Call upon the supreme minds of
past ages to support you in the strife
of this and they will prove stalwart,
faithful legions.  Read as is your need
and inclination; not as a duty, not as
a feat, but as an acknowledgment that
you are glad to win the best and most
helpful of friends.  Aristotle said
that all men desire knowledge.  If
knowledge means deeper human
sympathy, a more profound enlightenment,
a richer, happier, more productive
life, let each one of us admit that
the attainment of knowledge is in
truth our endeavor.  Let us try the
experiment of finding this knowledge
in the volumes of the deepest, the most
intensive livers.

Make the book you read to-day play
a part in the world of to-morrow, and
you will rise above the reader in the
closet who carps and criticizes, thus
cutting himself off from the work of
men.  You will disprove all statements
about the lack of practicability of
education, the other-worldiness of books.

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There was a boy who wandered out
along an unknown highway into a far
country.  The way seemed sombre,
foreign and meaningless.  His
questions were unanswered, his desires
unsatisfied; there seemed no by-paths
into which he could turn in the hope
of finding a solace or a reason for his
journey.

A never-ending vista without rhyme
or reason lay before him of flat,
uninteresting solitudes, only broken by
dark pits or rugged obstructions
which he had either to circle about or
climb over or under.  They always
annoyed and provoked him, as there
seemed no set plan for meeting such
difficulties, no apparent purpose in
wandering on.  He knew, however,
that there was no turning back, he had
to stagger, and stumble, and plod
forward, ever forward.

It was the way of life, and it was
a meaningless road, a disappointing
journey undertaken with great
expectations.

After a deal of suffering,
impatience and profound discouragement,
he came upon a great Palace standing
in his way.  It was the first that he had
ever seen, and he wondered at it.

With hesitancy he determined to
walk about it and to follow the beaten
road, uninteresting but familiar,
which he felt must stretch beyond.
He spied, however, a small door at the
side of the great barred gate and he
determined to enter and to see what
could be found within.  The panel
yielded to his timorous push, and he
found himself in a mighty hall where
there were wondrous things!

Many another wanderer had
already arrived, and many others
were to follow,—there was a happiness,
a purpose, a vitality in life that
had been sadly lacking upon the road
of his journeying.  Wisdom, riches,
the answers to his questions, the
reasons for his arduous pilgrimage
lay before him.  He grasped them and
was content.





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In a box.  $6.00 net.

This book places at the disposal of the general reader
all the information he may need in order to identify and
classify any piece of period furniture, whether it be an
original or a reproduction.  The authors have greatly
increased the value of the work by including an illustrative
chronological key.


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The Practical Book of Oriental Rugs

By G. GRIFFIN LEWIS.  New Edition, revised and enlarged.
Twenty full page illustrations in color, 93 illustrations in
double-tone, and 70 designs in line.  In a box.  $6.00 net.

"From cover to cover it is packed with detailed
information compactly and conveniently arranged for ready
reference.  Many people who are interested in the beautiful
fabrics of which the author treats have long wished
for such a book as this and will be grateful to G. Griffin
Lewis for writing it."—*The Dial*.


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The Practical Book of Garden Architecture

By PHEBE WESTCOTT HUMPHREYS.  Frontispiece in
color and 125 illustrations.  In a box.  $6.00 net.

This beautiful volume has been prepared from the
standpoints of eminent practicability, the best taste, and
general usefulness for the owner developing his own
property,—large or small,—for the owner employing a
professional garden architect, for the artist, amateur, student,
and garden lover.


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The Practical Book of Outdoor Rose Growing

By GEORGE C. THOMAS, JR.  New Edition, revised and
enlarged.  96 perfect photographic reproductions in full color.
Slip case.  $4.00 net.

There are a number of pages in which the complete
list of the best roses for our climate with their
characteristics are presented.  One prominent rose grower said
that these pages were worth their weight in gold to him.
The official bulletin of the Garden Club of America said:—"It
is a book one must have."  It is in fact in every sense
practical, stimulating, and suggestive.


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Parks: Their Design, Equipment and Use

By GEORGE BURNAP.  Official Landscape Architect, Public
Buildings and Grounds, Washington, D.C.  Profusely
illustrated.  Frontispiece in color.  $6.00 net.

This, the only exhaustive book on the subject and by
the foremost authority on the subject, is an amazing
addition to the literature of civic planning.  It is a
thorough résumé of the finest European and American examples
of Park work.  To the owner of a country estate and to
all who are interested in park and playground establishment
and up-keep, it will be a stimulating and trustworthy
guide.


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The Book of the Peony

By MRS. EDWARD HARDING.  Twenty full page color
illustrations, 25 in black and white.  $5.00 net.

The glory of the illustrative work and the authoritative
treatment by the author mark this book as one which
will stand alone amidst the literature upon this popular
flower.  It is a thorough and complete guide to the culture
of the peony and proves a fitting companion volume to
the famous "Practical Book of Outdoor Rose Growing."


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The Civilization of Babylonia and Assyria

By MORRIS JASTROW, JR., PH.D., LL.D.  140 illustrations.
In a box.  $7.00 net.

This work covers the whole civilization of Babylonia
and Assyria and by its treatment of the various aspects
of that civilization furnishes a comprehensive and
complete survey of the subject.  The language, history,
religion, commerce, law, art and literature are thoroughly
presented in a manner of deep interest to the general
reader and indispensable to the historian, clergyman,
anthropologist, and sociologist.


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Winter Journeys in the South

By JOHN MARTIN HAMMOND.  Profusely illustrated.  $3.50 net.

The kingdoms of wonder for the golfer, the automobilist
and almost every other type of pleasure-seeker are
revealed in this book.  Mr. Hammond is an enthusiastic
traveller and a skilful photographer.  He believes in the
pleasures that may be found in America.  He has wandered
about the South from White Sulphur to Palm Beach;
Aiken, Asheville, Charleston, New Orleans, and many
other places of fascinating interest have been stopping
points upon his journeyings.


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English Ancestral Homes of Noted Americans

By ANNE HOLLINGSWORTH WHARTON.  Twenty-eight
illustrations.  $2.00 net.

Miss Wharton so enlivens the past that she makes the
distinguished characters of whom she treats live and talk
with us.  She has recently visited the homelands of a
number of our great American leaders and we seem to
see upon their native heath the English ancestors of
George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, William Penn,
the Pilgrim Fathers and Mothers, the Maryland and
Virginia Cavaliers and others who have done their part
in the making of the United States.


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Quaint and Historic Forts of North America

By JOHN MARTIN HAMMOND.  Photogravure frontispiece
and sixty-five illustrations.  In a box.  $5.00 net.

Mr. Hammond, in his excellent literary style, with the
aid of a splendid camera, brings us on a journey through
the existing old forts of North America and there describes
their appearances and confides to us their romantic and
historic interest.  We follow the trail of the early English,
French and Spanish adventurers, and the soldiers of the
Revolution, the War of 1812, and the later Civil and
Indian Wars.


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Joseph Pennell's Pictures of the Wonder of Work

Profusely illustrated.  $2.00 net.

Mr. Pennell is notably a modern, and has found art in
one of the greatest phases of modern achievement—the
Wonder of Work—the building of giant ships, railway
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marble-quarrying; oil-wells and wharves—all the
great work which man sets his hand to do.  The crisp
and wonderful and inspiring touches of introduction to
each picture are as illuminating as the pictures themselves.


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.. class:: bold

Nights: Rome, Venice, in the
Aesthetic Eighties; Paris, London, in the
Fighting Nineties.

By ELIZABETH ROBINS PENNELL.  Sixteen illustrations
from photographs and etchings.  $3.00 net.

The pleasure of association with equally famous literary
and artistic friends has been the good fortune of the
Pennells.  The illustrations, photographs, and some
etchings by Joseph Pennell are unusual.


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Our Philadelphia

By ELIZABETH ROBINS PENNELL.  Illustrated by Joseph
Pennell, with 105 reproductions of lithographs.  In a box.
$7.50 net.


Joseph Pennell's Pictures of the Panama Canal

Twenty-eight reproductions of lithographs made on the Isthmus
of Panama, with Mr. Pennell's Introduction giving his
experiences and impressions.  $1.25 net.


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Joseph Pennell's Pictures in the Land of Temples

Forty plates in photogravure from lithographs.  $1.25 net.


.. vspace:: 2

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Life of James McNeill Whistler

By ELIZABETH ROBINS and JOSEPH PENNELL.  Thoroughly
revised Fifth Edition of the authorized Life.  Ninety-seven
plates reproduced from Whistler's works.  Whistler
binding.  $4.00 net.  Three-quarter grain levant.  $8.50 net.


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Rings

By GEORGE FREDERICK KUNZ, PH.D.  Profusely illustrated
in color and doubletone.  In a box.  $6.00 net.

The origin, purposes and methods of wearing, the forms
and materials, the historic interest and talismanic powers
of rings as they have played a part in the life and associations
of man.  It is an authoritative volume, magnificently
illustrated.


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Shakespeare and Precious Stones

By GEORGE FREDERICK KUNZ, PH.D.  Four illustrations.
$1.25 net.

Treating of all the known references to precious stones
in Shakespeare's works, with comments as to the origin
of his material, the knowledge of the poet concerning
precious stones, and references as to where precious
stones of his time came from.


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The Curious Lore of Precious Stones

By GEORGE FREDERICK KUNZ, PH.D.  Profusely illustrated
in color, doubletone and line.  In a box.  $6.00 net.

Being a description of their sentiments and folk lore,
superstitions, symbolism, mysticism, use in protection,
prevention, religion and divination, crystal gazing, birth
stones, lucky stones and talismans, astral, zodiacal and
planetary.


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.. class:: bold

The Magic of Jewels and Charms

By GEORGE FREDERICK KUNZ, PH.D.  Profusely illustrated
in color, doubletone and line.  In a box.  $6.00 net.

Magic jewels and electric gems; meteorites or celestial
stones; stones of healing; fabulous stones; concretions
and fossils; snake stones and bezoars; charms of ancient
and modern times, etc.


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Open that Door!

By R. STURGIS INGERSOLL.  $1.00 net.

A stimulating volume with a "kick" upon the relation
of books to life; the part great books play in our goings
and comings, in the office, in the street, and in the market
place.  The relation of poetry to the suburbanite, etc.
A book for the man who never reads and for the one who
does.


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From Nature Forward

By HARRIET DOAN PRENTISS.  Limp leather binding.
$2.00 net.

The public mind is unsettled; the individual lives a
day-to-day existence, wrestling with disease, mental
troubles and unsatisfactory issues.  This book outlines a
system of psychological reforms that can be followed by
every man and woman, as the author says, to "buoyant
physical health, release of mental tension, and enlarged
and happy outlook on life."


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Peg Along

By DR. GEORGE L. WALTON.  $1.00 net.

Dr. Walton's slogan, "Why Worry," swept the country.
His little book of that title did an infinite amount of
good.  "Peg Along" is the present slogan.  Hundreds of
thousands of fussers, fretters, semi- and would-be invalids,
and all other halters by the wayside should be reached
by Dr. Walton's stirring encouragement to "peg along."


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.. class:: bold

A Short History of the Navy

By Captain GEORGE R. CLARK, U.S.N., Professor
W. O. STEVENS, Ph.D., Instructor CARROL S. ALDEN, Ph.D.,
Instructor HERMAN F. KRAFFT, LL.B., of the United States
Naval Academy.  New Edition.  Illustrated.  $3.00 net.

This standard volume is used as a text at the United
States Naval Academy.  This edition brings the material
to date and is an especially timely book.



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LIPPINCOTT'S TRAINING SERIES

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For Those Who Wish To Find Themselves

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A series of handbooks by authorities for young
men and women engaged or anticipating becoming
engaged in any one of the various professions.
The aim is to present the best methods of
education and training, channels of advancement, etc.


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Training for the Newspaper Trade

By DON C. SEITZ, Business Manager of the New York World.
Illustrated.  $1.25 net.


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Training for the Street Railway Business

By C. B. FAIRCHILD, JR., Executive Assistant of the
Philadelphia Rapid Transit Co.  Illustrated.  $1.25 net.


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Training for the Stage

By ARTHUR HORNBLOW, Editor of The Theatre Magazine.
Preface by DAVID BELASCO.  Illustrated.  $1.25 net.


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Training of a Forester

By GIFFORD PINCHOT, New Edition, illustrated.  $1.25 net.

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IN PREPARATION

.. vspace:: 2

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The Training and Rewards of a Doctor

By DR. RICHARD C. CABOT.


.. vspace:: 2

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The Training and Rewards of a Lawyer

By HARLAN STONE, Dean of the Columbia Law School.


.. vspace:: 2

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Fundamentals of Military Service

By CAPTAIN LINCOLN C. ANDREWS, U.S. Cavalry.  Prepared
under the supervision of Major-General Leonard Wood,
U.S.A.  Bound in limp leather.  $1.50 net.

This book is especially prepared for citizens who wish
in the militia, in training camps or in military courses
to equip themselves thoroughly for the responsibility that
may come upon them.  "A really capital handbook."—*Theodore
Roosevelt*.  "This little handbook is one which
each and everyone should read."—*General Leonard Wood*.


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Fight For Food

By LEON A. CONGDON, Advising member of Kansas State
Board Health.  $1.25 net.

The high cost of living is everybody's problem.  This
book presents the reason and stimulating thoughts upon
the solution.  It treats the problem from the producer's,
the middleman's and the consumer's viewpoints.


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The Rise of Rail Power in War and Conquest

By E. A. PRATT.  $2.50 net.

The basis upon which military railway transport has
been organized alike in Germany, France and the United
Kingdom, with a presentation of the vast importance of
railway facilities in modern warfare and a thorough
discussion of the subject from the standpoint of the American
looking to his country's needs.


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.. class:: bold

First Aid in Emergencies

By ELDRIDGE L. ELIASON, M.D.  106 illustrations.  $1.50 net.

Nowhere will be found a better First Aid guide for the
soldier, the camper, the sportsman, the teacher, scout
master, and the father and mother of the family.



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   LIPPINCOTT'S READER'S
   REFERENCE LIBRARY

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Each volume: crown octavo, half morocco, gilt top.

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HEROES AND HEROINES OF FICTION.  Modern Prose and
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HEROES AND HEROINES OF FICTION.  Classical, Mediæval
and Legendary.  By William S. Walsh.  $3.00 net.

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HANDY-BOOK OF LITERARY CURIOSITIES.  By William
S. Walsh.  $3.50 net.

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HANDY-BOOK OF CURIOUS INFORMATION.  By William
S. Walsh.  $3.50 net.

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A DICTIONARY OF MIRACLES.  By Rev. E. Cobham Brewer,
LL.D.  $2.50 net.

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DICTIONARY OF PHRASE AND FABLE.  By Rev. E. Cobham
Brewer, LL.D.  $1.75 net.

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BENHAM'S BOOK OF QUOTATIONS.  By W. Gurney Benham.
$3.50 net.

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THESAURUS OF ENGLISH WORDS AND PHRASES.  By
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A DICTIONARY OF ENGLISH SYNONYMS.  By Richard Soule.
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CHAMBERS'S BIOGRAPHICAL DICTIONARY.  Edited by David
Patrick and Francis Hindes Groome.  $3.00 net.

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CURIOSITIES OF POPULAR CUSTOMS.  By William S. Walsh.
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THE HISTORIC NOTEBOOK.  By Rev. E. Cobham Brewer,
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THE READER'S HANDBOOK.  By Rev. E. Cobham Brewer,
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FACTS AND FANCIES FOR THE CURIOUS.  By Charles
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WORDS, FACTS AND PHRASES.  By Eliezer Edwards.  $2.50 net.

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CHAMBERS'S TWENTIETH CENTURY DICTIONARY OF THE
ENGLISH LANGUAGE.  $2.00 net.

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