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One cannot wholly get away from the weather even if his mind be of the sanest and his body of the soundest; we are too much involved in the general order of things not to be more or less sympathetic with the atmosphere and sky. There are days when one must make a strenuous effort to be less than gay; there are days when one must make an equally strenuous effort to preserve the bare appearance of cheerfulness.

And yet no man need be the slave of the day; he may escape out of it into the broad spaces of the years, into the vastness of the centuries. There is every kind of weather in books, and on such a day as this one has but to make his choice of climate, season, and sky. Stirring the fire until it throws a ruddy glow on the windows where the melancholy day weeps in monotonous despair, I may open Theocritus, and what to me are the fogs and mists of March on the Atlantic coast? I am in Sicily, and the olive and pine are green, sky and sea meet in a line so blue that I know not whether it be water or atmosphere; the cicada whirs; the birds stir in the little wood; and from the distance come the notes of the shepherd's pipe. All this is mine if I choose to stretch out my hand and open a little book—all this and a hundred other shining skies north and south, east and west. I need not spend a minute with this March day if I choose to open any one of these countless doors of escape. I know the roads well, for I have often taken them when such mists as

these that lie upon the woods and meadows have pressed too closely on my spirits.

But there is something to be learned from a dull day, and the wiser part is to stay and con the lesson. He who knows only brilliant skies has still to know some of the profoundest aspects behind which nature conceals herself. Corot's morning skies stir the imagination to its very depths; but so also do those noble etchings of Van Gravesande which report the blackness of night and storm about the lighthouse and the somber mystery of the deep woods.

A dull day need not be a depressing day; depression always implies physical or moral weakness, and is, therefore, never to be tolerated so long as one can struggle against it. But a dull day—a day without deep emotions, inspiring thought, marked events; a day monotonous and colorless; a day which proclaims itself neutral among all the conflicting interests of life, is a day to be valued. Such a day is recuperative, sedative, reposeful. It gives emotion opportunity to accumulate volume and force, thought time to clarify and review its conclusions, the senses that inaction which freshens them for clearer perceptions and keener enjoyments. A dull day is often the mother of many bright days. It is easy to surrender one's self to the better mood of such a day; to accept its repose and reject its gloom. As the hours pass one finds himself gently released from the tension of the work which had begun to haunt his dreams, quietly

detached from places and persons associated with the discipline and responsibility of daily occupation. The steady dropping of the rain soothes and calms the restlessness of a mind grown too fixed upon its daily task; the low-lying mists aid the illusion that the world beyond is a dream, and that the only reality is here within these cheerful walls. After a time this passive enjoyment becomes active, this negative pleasure takes on a positive form. There is something pleasant in the beat of the storm, something agreeable in the colorless landscape. One has gotten rid of his every-day self, and gotten into the mood of a day which discountenances great enterprises and sustained endeavors of every kind. One stirs the fire with infinite satisfaction, and coddles himself in the cozy contrast between the cheerfulness within and the gloom without. One wanders from window to window, lounges in every easy chair, gives himself up to dreams which come and go without order or coherence, as if the mind had given itself up to play. Pleasant places and faces reappear from a past into which they had been somewhat rudely pressed by a present too busy to concern itself with memories; old plans reform themselves, old purposes and hopes are revived; the works one meant to accomplish and abandoned by the way disclose new possibilities of realization. When the afternoon begins to darken, one finds that he has gathered from the past many fragments that promise to find completion in some new and

sounder form. It has been a day of gleaning, if not of harvesting. As the night descends, fresh fuel renews the smoldering flame, and the past, so quietly, almost unconsciously, recalled, projects itself into the future, and stirs the imagination with a hope that to-morrow may become a purpose, and the day after an achievement.

CHAPTER XVI.

THE UNIVERSAL BIOGRAPHY.

ALL day long the snow has been whirling over the fields in shapes so varied and so elusive that I have fancied myself present at a dance of phantoms-wandering ghosts of dead seasons haunting the fields which once spread out sunlighted and fragrant before them. At intervals the sun has pierced the clouds and touched the earth with a dazzling brilliancy, but for the most part the winds have driven the storm before them, and at times wrapped all visible things in a white mist of obscurity. On such a day the open fire lights the open book with a glow of peculiar cheer and friendliness; it seems to search out whatever of human warmth lies at the root of a man's thought, and to kindle it with a kindred heat. On such a day the companionable quality of a book discovers itself as at no other time; it seems to take advantage of the absence of nature to exert its own peculiar charm. In summer the vast and inexhaustible life of nature, audible at every hour and present at every turn of thought, makes most books pallid and meager. In the universal light which streams over the earth all lights of man's making seem artificial, unreal, and out of

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