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The quiet hours before one's fire, with one's books at hand; the long ramble along the woodland roadthese make one free to brood over the thoughts that come unbidden, to follow them step by step to their unseen goals, and to drink in the subtle and invisible influences of the hour when one gives one's self up to it. There is nothing in all the rich and deep experience of life so full of quiet joy, so freighted with the revelations of the things we seek with completest sincerity, as these pauses of solitude in the ceaseless stir and movement of the world.

CHAPTER XXX.

A NEW HEARTH.

In most men there is a native conservatism; even those who are progressive and radical in their view of things in general are stanch defenders of old habits and familiar places. The man who has his doubts about absolute private ownership will hesitate long before cutting down some old-time tree whose beauty decay is fast changing into ugliness, or giving up the inconvenient and narrow home of childhood for more ample and attractive quarters. We cling to old things by instinct, and because they have been a part of our lives. When Rosalind and myself began talking about a new and ampler hearth for the study fire, the prospect, although alluring was not without its shadows. There was not only the consciousness of the surrender of delightful associations, but the thought of the newness to be made old and the coldness to be made warm. fresh hearth has no sentiment until the fire has roared up the wide-throated chimney on windy nights, no associations until its glow has fallen. on a circle of familiar faces.

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But how soon the strange becomes familiar, and

that which was detached from all human fellowship takes on the deeper interest and profounder meaning of human life! Rosalind had barely lighted the fire on the new hearth before the room seemed familiar and homelike. The bit of driftwood which the children laid on at a later stage was really needed to give a suggestion of something strange and foreign to our daily habit. There is a wonderful power in us of imparting ourselves to our surroundings; the fountain of vitality constantly overflows and fertilizes everything we touch. We give ourselves to the rooms in which we live and the tools with which we work. It is not only the pen with which the great man wrote and the toy with which the little child played that gain a kind of sacredness in our eyes; it is almost every object that has had human use. The infinite pains which Balzac put into the description of the belongings of his chief characters give evidence of that virile genius which caught not only the direct ray of character but gathered up also its myriad reflections in the things it used. Life is always the most precious of our possessions, and it is because inanimate things often hold so much of it that they come to have a kind of sanctity for us.

If the deeper history of our race were written, would not one half of it record the attachments which men have formed for visible and invisible things for homes and churches and countries, for institutions and beliefs and ideals-and the other

half record the struggles and the agony with which men have detached themselves from the things they have loved? To humanize by use and by love, and then to forsake as the trees drop their leaves in autumn-is not this the human story and the human destiny? There is a noble side to it, and a very painful side. I can readily understand the halfpathetic note of those who recall the past with a poignant sense of loss; to whom the great inspirations have remained in the beliefs and the ideals of youth, and whose later journey has been one ever-widening separation from the dear familiar things of long ago. The men in the early part of the century, who had read Addison and Dryden and Pope in childhood, could not be expected to discern at once the genius of Wordsworth, or to hear at first the ethereal strain of Shelley; as to-day many who were nourished on Wordsworth and Byron and Keats are unresponsive to Browning or Rossetti; and now that the massive harmonies of the German composers are filling the opera-houses, there are many who openly or in secret are longing for those brilliant Italian melodies which once captivated the world. The past must be dear to us, since it was once part of us, and when we recall its story we turn the pages of our own biography. The old hearthstone can never be other than sacred, since the light of it was on faces that we loved, and the song of it was often our own thought set to the

cheerful music which the logs sing when the living woods are silent.

But shall there be no new hearth because the old hearth has so often warmed and comforted us; no new song because the old songs set our youth to their thrilling music? The charm of the past always remains; we do not surrender it when we accept the new truth and listen to the new melody; we are not disloyal to it when we live deeply and resolutely in the age which gives us birth. For myself, a radical of radicals in the faith that the better things are always in the future, that truth has always fresh voices to speak for it, and art new inspirations to lend it new beauty, I believe that the only way to understand the past is to accept and live in the present. The true Wordsworthian is he who discrminates the great and genuine work of the poet from that which bears his name but not his genius-not he who insists that all the lines have equal inspiration. The true lover of Browning is not he who affirms the infallibility of the poet, but he who takes account of the ebb and flow of the poet's inspiration. The true lover of the things that have been done and the men who did them is not he who lives in the past and lacks, therefore, a just perspective; but he who lives in his own time, loyal to its duties and open to its visions, and who sees the past as one looks upon a landscape from an elevation which brings all its landmarks and boundaries into clear view. Let the fire blaze on the new hearth and

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