the sober threads of care and work are interwoven with the soft hues of love and the splendid dyes of imagination; feelings, thoughts, actions, are no longer detached and isolated; they are blended together into the fullness and symmetry of a rich life. One's toil gathers sweetness from the thought of those to whose comfort it ministers; one's books are enriched by the consciousness of the immeasurable life from which they flow as tiny rivulets; one's friends stand for genius and art and noble achievement; and one's life ceases to be a single strain, and becomes a harmony of many chords, each suggesting and deepening the melody of every other.

Last evening, after dinner, Rosalind, after her usual custom, began playing some simple, beautiful German compositions, to which the children never fail to respond with a merry frolic. When she came to the end of the daily programme, one of the dancers, golden hair all in disorder, pointed to a page in the open music book, and said: "Mamma, please play that; it always makes me think of 'Baby Bell.'"' Happy Mr. Aldrich! Could anything be more delightful than to know that one's verse is associated with music in the mind of a child! The simple request, with its reason, made a deep impression on me; I saw for the first time how early the sense of universal beauty is awake in childhood, and how instinctively it sees that all beautiful things are akin to each other. It was the first page in that sublime revelation of the soul of things through which a man

comes at last to see in one vision the flower at his feet and the evening star silvery and solitary on the girdle of the early night, the radiant smile on the face that he loves and the great measureless wealth of sunshine across the summer fields. It is this clear perception of the universal relationship of things which makes a man a scholar instead of a pedant, and turns a library into a place of inspiration and impulse instead of a place of memory and repose.

In my experience the association between books and music is intimate and ever recurring. I never hear a certain piece of Haydn's without seeing, on the instant, the massive ranges of the Scottish Highlands as they rise into the still heavens in the pages of Walter Scott's "Waverley"; and there is another simple melody which carries me back to the shipwreck in the "Æneid." Some books seem to have found a more subtle rendering at the hands of Chopin; and there are others which recall movements in Beethoven's symphonies. For this reason it is a great delight to read with a soft accompaniment of music in another room; there always remains an echo of melody hidden in the heart of thoughts that have come to one under such circumstances, and which gives back its unheard note when they are read again elsewhere. In reading Milton one rarely forgets that the hand which wrote "Paradise Lost knew the secrets of the organ and could turn them into sound at will.

How many and how rich are the personal associa

tions of books that have gradually been brought together as one needed them for his work, and was drawn there by some personal longing! This book has the author's name written in a characteristic hand on the fly-leaf; between the leaves of its neighbor is hidden a friendly note from the writer, recalling the peculiar circumstances under which it was written; and in this famous novel which lies open before me there is a rose which bloomed last summer across the sea in the novelist's garden in Surrey. In a place by themselves are six little volumes worn with much reading and with many journeyings. For many years they were the constant companions of one whose hand touched some of the deepest chords of life, and made a music of her own which the world will not soon forget. They speak to me sometimes with the clearness and authority of her own words, so many are the traces which she has left upon them of intimate fellowship. They have been read by the fjords of Norway and the lakes of Italy, and I never open them without feeling the presence of that eager and aspiring spirit to whom every day was an open door to a new truth and a fresh life. Indeed, I am never so near the world as in my study, nor do I ever feel elsewhere the burden and mystery of life coming in upon me with such awful and subduing power. There are hours when these laden shelves seem to me like some vast organ upon whose keys an unseen hand evokes the full harmony of life.

What a magical power of recalling past intellectual experiences familiar books possess!—experiences that were the beginnings of new epochs in our personal history. One may almost recount the growth of his mind by the titles of great books; the first reading of Carlyle's essay on "Characteristics," of Emerson's "Nature," of Goethe's "Faust," of Coleridge's "Literaria Biographica"-how the freshness and inspiration of those hours of dawning insight come back to one as he turns the well-worn leaves! It used to be regarded as a rare piece of good fortune to have the opportunity of loaning books to Coleridge; the great thinker always returned them with margins enriched with criticisms and comments and references often of far greater value than the text itself. A book so annotated, with the initials S. T. C. on every other page, became thereafter too precious ever to be loaned again. like manner there are written on the margins of the books we have about us all manner of personal incident and history; no one reads these invisible records but ourselves, but to us they sometimes outweight the book itself.

In

AMONG the multitude of books which find their way to the light of my study fire there comes, at long intervals, one which searches my own consciousness to the depths and on the instant compels my recognition of that rare creation, a true work of art. The indefinable atmosphere, the incommunicable touch, of perfection are about and upon it, and one is suddenly conscious of a new and everlasting possession for the race. Such a book lies open before me; it is the "Journal Intime" of Henri Frédéric Amiel. "There is a point of perfection in art," says La Bruyère, "as there is of goodness and ripeness in nature; he who feels and loves it has perfect taste; he who feels it not, and who loves something beneath or beyond it, has faulty taste." The perfection which I feel in this book is something deeper and diviner than taste; it is a matter of soul, and must therefore remain undescribed. Like the flawless line of beauty, it will instantly reveal itself to those who have the instinct for art, and to those who fail to perceive it at the first glance it will remain forever invisible. There is in some natures a quality of ripeness which makes all the hard