long in finding him; that it left him so many years in peace to do his work and let his soul out. His contempt for popularity was well expressed in the phrase, 'Men are like flies; if one alights on a dish, others will follow.' No happier man ever lived than Corot during those years when there was nothing to do but sit in the fields, pipe in mouth, and watch the morning sky, and then go and paint it. As for Méryon, his case was a hard one; but there was madness in his blood, and, after all, he had the supreme satisfaction of saying his say. He put himself on his plates, and that was enough for any man.

canvas.

"People are so stupid about this matter of success," he continued, walking up and down the room. "They seem to think a man is miserable unless they crowd his studio. For my part, I don't want them there. Don't you understand that all an artist asks is a chance to work? What we want is not success, but the chance to get ourselves on to I paint because I can't help it; I am tortured with thirst for expression. Give me expression, and I am happy; deny it, and I am miserable." Here a copy of Keats caught his eye. "It is the same with all of us; there was never a greater mistake than the idea that Keats was unhappy because critics fell foul of him and the people didn't read him. It is natural to wish that people would see things as we see them, but the chief thing is that we see them ourselves. Keats didn't write for the crowd; he wrote for himself. There was a pain

in his soul that could only be eased by writing. When a man writes an Ode to a Grecian Urn,' he doesn't need to be told that he is successful. They talk about Shakespeare's indifference to fame as if it were the sign of a small nature which could not recognize its own greatness. Can't they see that Shakespeare wrote to free his own mind and heart? that before he wrote either play he had conquered in himself the weakness of Hamlet on the one hand, and the weakness of Romeo on the other? Never was a man more fortunate than Shakespeare, for he wrote himself entirely out; he completely expressed himself. I can imagine him turning his back on London and settling down to his small concerns at Stratford with supreme content. What can the world give to or take from the man who has lived his life and put the whole of it into art? I understand that everybody is reading Browning nowadays; I am surprised they waited so long. I discovered him long ago, and have fed on him ever since, because I felt the eager longing for life and the quenchless thirst for expression in him. English poet has said such true things about art, because no one else has understood so thoroughly an artist's hunger and thirst, and the things that give him peace." Just at this point, when I was getting into a talking mood myself, our friend stopped suddenly, declared that he had forgotten an engagement, seized his hat and coat, and made off after his customary abrupt fashion.

No

CHAPTER XIII.

ESCAPING FROM BONDAGE.

I have often pictured to myself the scene in the old Tower when Raleigh broke the spell of prison life by writing the history of the world. The restless prisoner, a born leader and man of affairs, whose ambitious projects were spread over two continents, was suddenly secluded from the life of his time at the hour when that life had for every daring spirit an irresistible attraction. On the instant this audacious courtier of fortune, ready to take advantage of any wind and strike for any prize, was locked and bolted in the solitude of a cell! Such a man must find vent for his arrested energies, or prey upon himself. If Raleigh could not go to the world, the world must come to him! And it came, not to scorn and triumph over him, but to submit to the calm scrutiny of his active mind. There have been more striking examples of the victory of a soul over its surroundings; Epictetus made himself free though a slave, and Marcus Aurelius learned how to serve though an emperor; but there has been no more dramatic illustration of the victorious assertion of personality.

The limitations of most lives are by no means so

tangible as the walls within which Raleigh was confined, but there is a certain amount of restriction laid on us all. We are all prisoners in some sense; the great man who, of all others, demonstrated most sublimely the superiority of the soul over all external conditions, described himself as "a prisoner of hope." There are fixed limits to the activity of even the freest life; and for many, a narrow field is set both for happiness and for work. There is one place, however, where no boundaries are fixed, no doors closed, no bolts shot: among his books a man laughs at his bonds and finds an open road out of every form of imprisonment. Last night Rosalind read to me, from Silvio Pellico's Memoirs, pictures of his prison life. His very bondage had furnished material for his pen; out of the barrenness of his prisons he had gathered a harvest of experience and thought. There is no kind of bondage which life lays upon us that may not yield both sweetness and strength, and nothing reveals a man's character more fully than the spirit in which he bears his limitations.

It is an easy matter for the man of many burdens and of sharp restrictions of duty and opportunity to become envious, to rail at fate, and to decry the fortune and work of those who are better circumstanced. It is very easy for such a man to shut his mind and heart within the same walls which confine his body, and to become narrow, hard, and unsympathetic. There are hosts of men who impose their

own limitations on the world and set up their own narrowness as the standard of virtue; who identify their own small conceptions of time and eternity with a divine revelation of truth and pronounce all who differ from them anathema. There are few spectacles more common or more pitiful than these strange illusions by which men mistake their littleness for greatness and the narrow boundaries of their own thoughts and feelings for the outermost bounds and sheer edge of the universe. To be in prison and not be conscious of the bondage is surely a tragic comment on one's ideal of freedom.

We are all shut up within intangible walls of ignorance, prejudice, half-knowledge; and the diference between men is not the difference between those who are in bonds and those who are free, but between those who feel their bondage and are striving for freedom, and those who, being bound, think themselves loose. The long story of the struggles and agonies and achievements of men is the story of the unbroken effort for freedom; it is the record of countless attempts to break jail and live under God's clear heavens. Hegel declared that the great fact of history is the struggle for freedom, and Matthew Arnold reaffirmed the same thing when he said again and again that the instinct for expansion is at the bottom of the movement of civilization. It is this heroic endeavor, often futile, often defeated, but never abandoned, which gives history its dignity and its thrilling interest.