sing lustily in the throat of the new chimney; its light still falls on the old books and gilds the familiar titles! We cannot reject the past if we would; it is part of us, and it travels with us wherever we go. Not by reproducing its forms, but by discerning its spirit, do we really honor it. It is an illusion that the past was fixed and permanent, and that we are in the seething flood. The past was never less mobile than the present; it was always changing, and that which seems fixed and stable to us is the form-the only part that is dead. Read deeply any of the old books, and you will hear the roar of the rushing river in them as distinctly as you hear it in Hugo or Ibsen or Tennyson. Beneath the great tragedies to which the Greeks listened what a vast movement of the deeps of human thought and feeling! Beneath the "Divine Comedy" what a whirl of rushing tides! Beneath Marlowe and Shakespeare what tumult of the great seas! Genius means always and everywhere change and movement; never yet has it lacked the vision which made the future dear to it. When that vision ceases to inspire the artist's thought and hand, genius will take its flight. For the deepest and most inspiring truth in which we live is the truth that life is change and growth, not fixity of form and finality of development. Things move, not because they are unstable, but because a divine impulse impels them forward; the stars travel, not because they are wanderers in the skies, but because they are the servants of a sub

lime order. There are no fixed and permanent social conditions, because society is slowly moving toward a nobler ordering of its duties and its rights; there are no final books, because the human spirit, of which the greatest books are but imperfect expressions, is always passing through manifold experiences into larger knowledge of itself and of the world about it; there are no final forms of art because truth has always new beauty to reveal and beauty new truth to illustrate. Let the fire on the new hearth sing its lusty song of the summers that are past; its music has no note of forgetfulness; memory and prophecy are the burden of its song.

CHAPTER XXXI.

AN IDYL OF WANDERING.

In these spring days all manner of alluring invitations find their way into my study and by the suggestions which they bring with them make its walls narrow and dingy in spite of the glow which pleasant associations have cast upon them. When I sit at my writing table in the morning and carefully arrange the unwritten sheets which are to receive the work of the day, a playful breeze comes in at the window and willfully scatters the spotless pages about the room as if to protest against work and seclusion in these radiant days when the heavens rain sweet influences and the earth gives back its bloom and fragrance. I think then of all manner of places where the earliest and tenderest beauty of summer abides; the imagination revolts against work and, like a child let loose from city squares, runs through meadows white with daisies and into bosky hollows where the ferns breathe out a delicious coolness. I cannot resist the impulse which nature yearly renews in this golden hour of her beauty, and so I sally forth to such refreshment and adventure as one may look for in the hey-day of spring time.

Yesterday I waved my handkerchief with the throng who crowded the pier and sent their huzzas after the great steamer swinging slowly into the stream, bound for that old world of history and imagination which has such hold upon the most American of us all. I followed the little group whom my affection separated from the throng on the deck until I could distinguish their faces no more; and then, when sight failed, thought traveled fast upon their foaming wake and travels with them still. I know what days of calm and nights of splendor, when the stars hang luminous over the silent world of waters, will be theirs; I know with what eager gaze they will scan the low horizon line when the first indistinct outlines of another continent break its perfect symmetry; I hear with them the first confused murmur of that rich old-world life; I follow them through historic street to historic church and palace; I see the blossoming hedges and mark the low ripple of quiet rivers flowing seaward, the murmur of whose movement lends its music to so much English poetry; I catch a sudden glimpse of cloud-like peaks breaking the inaccessible solitude of the sky, and in a moment the whole landscape of that rich world sweeps into sight and invites me to join them in their wanderings.

This season stirs one knows not what ancient instinct still in the very blood of our race, answering the first voices of the birds returning from their long journey, and the first outburst of life flowing

The

back in the flood tide of advancing summer. history of civilization is an Odyssey of wandering. From the hour when Abraham gathered his flocks and crossed the Euphrates, and those first Aryan ancestors of ours set out on their sublime emigration westward, to this day, when the ax of the pioneer rings through the California pine forests, and the camp-fire of the explorer rises beside the Congo, men have never ceased to travel hither and thither driven by a divine impulse to redeem and replenish the earth. In the long course of centuries the tent of the Arab is as permanent as the rock-built temple, and looking over history all races become nomadic. No race accepts its environment as permanent and final; there is always somewhere beyond the horizon of its present condition an undiscovered Atlantis, an untrodden Isle of the Blessed, where life will beat with stronger pulse, and smite into the obstacles that surround it the impress of a higher destiny. As the thought of a great, new world sent Columbus wandering from court to court, so the intuition of some larger and grander life impels men continually from continent to continent; not restlessness, but aspiration, fills the sails and turns the prow seaward forever and forever. The impulse which would not suffer Ulysses, old and travel-worn, to sit at ease stirs in the blood of the most modern of us all; our hearts beat to the music of his last appeal, spoken through one of the greatest of our modern poets: