cio and the men of the great Italian Revival carried through Europe, and to meet here and there some large-minded, noble-hearted scholar, standing book in hand, but always with the windows of his chamber open to the fields and woods, always with the doors of his life open to human need and fellowship. For true scholarship never dies; the fire sometimes passes from one to another in the hollow of a reed, as in the earliest time, but it never goes out. I confess that I can never read quite unmoved the story of the Brethern of the Common Life, those humbleminded, patient teachers and thinkers whose devotion and fire of soul for a century and a half made the choice treasures of Italian palaces and convents and universities a common possession along the lowlying shores of the Netherlands. The asceticism of this noble brotherhood was no morbid and divisive fanaticism; it was a denial of themselves that they might have the more to give. The visions which touched at times the bare walls of their cells with supernal beauty only made them the more eager to share their heaven of privilege with the sorely burdened world without. Surely Virgil and Horace and the other masters of classic form were never more honored than when these noble-minded lovers of learning and of their kind made their sounding lines familiar in peasant homes. Among the great folios of the fifteenth century, the very titles of which the modern scholar no longer burdens his memory with, there is one little volume which the

world has known by heart these four hundred years and more. Its bulk is so small that one may carry it in his pocket, but its depth of feeling is so great that one never gets quite to the bottom of it, and its outlook is so sublime that one never sees quite to the end of it. The great folios are monuments of patience and imperfect information; this little volume is instinct with human life; a soul speaks to souls in it. It was by no caprice of nature that the "De Imitatione Christi" was written by a member of the Brotherhood of the Common Life. And when the great hour of deliverance from priestcraft for Germany and Northern Europe came, it was no accident that made another member of the same order the fellow-worker with Luther for liberty of thought. Erasmus was no reformer, but he was a true scholar, and in the splendor of his great attainments and the importance of his great service the obscure virtues of the Brotherhood of the Common Life receive a final and perpetual illumination.

In Kaulbach's striking cartoon of the Reformation there is one figure which no one overlooks, although Shakespeare and Michael Angelo stand in full view. Among the masters of art and literature the cobbler, with his leather apron, finds a place by right of possession which no one of his compeers would dispute. The six thousand compositions of Hans Sachs are for the most part forgotten, with the innumerable poems of the Minnesingers and Meistersingers, but there remain a few verses which

the world will not care to forget. In spite of the roughness of his verse, its unmelodious movement, its lack of musical cadence and accent, the cobbler of Nürnberg lived in the life of his time; he had eyes that looked upon the skies and fields, and a heart that was one with the hearts of his people. It was this vital perception that saved him from slavery to the mechanism of verse and made him a poet in spite of his time and himself. A genuine scholar, and yet a man of the people, Hans Sachs lifts himself out of the mechanical pedantry of his age by the freshness of his contact with life. He might truly have said of himself, as he has said of another:

No man can live in a "Palace of Art" without danger of missing, not only his own highest development, but that heritage of truth which is always a common and never a personal possession. The poet who separates himself from his fellows reproduces himself by a law which holds him powerless in its grasp; the poet who lives richly and deeply with his kind learns the secrets of all hearts, and, like Shakespeare, sees the endless procession of humanity passing as he looks into his own soul. The scholar masters the letter and misses the spirit as he sits in unbroken seclusion among his books; the light of common love and joy and sorrow which

alone penetrates knowledge to its heart and suffuses bare statement with the soul of truth fades from the page utterly. And so the study door stands open, and intermingling with the great thoughts of the past there comes the sound of voices that break the solitude of life with hope and faith and love, and the rush of little feet that transform it with that thought of eternal youth which is only another word for immortality.

CHAPTER XV.

DULL DAYS.

It is a day of mist and rain; a day without light or color. The leaden sky rests heavily, almost oppressively, on the earth; the monotonous dropping of the rain sets the gray dreariness of the day to a slow, unvarying rhythm. On such a day nature seems wrapped in an inaccessible mood, and one gets no help from her. On such a day it not unfrequently happens that one's spirits take on the color of the world, and not a flower blooms, not a bird sings, in the garden of the imagination. If one yields to the mood, he puts on the hair shirt of the penitent, and spends the long hours in recalling his sins and calculating the sum total of his mistakes. If one is candid and sensitive, the hours as they pass steadily add to the balance on the debit side of the account, and long ere the night comes bankruptcy has been reached and accepted as a just award of an ill-spent life. Everybody who has any imagination, and suffers lapses from a good physical condition, knows these gray days and dreads them as visitors who enter without the formality of knocking, and who linger long after the slender welcome which gave them unwilling recognition has been worn thread