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

T is a day of mist and rain; a day without light or colour. 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 colour 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 threadbare. One cannot wholly get away from the weather even if his mind be of the sanest and his body of the soundest; we are too much involved in the general order of things not to be more or less sympathetic with the atmosphere and sky. There are days when one must make a strenuous effort to be less than gay; there are days when

one must make an equally strenuous effort to preserve the bare appearance of cheerfulness.

And yet no man need be the slave of the day; he may escape out of it into the broad spaces of the years, into the vastness of the centuries. There is every kind of weather in books, and on such a day as this one has but to make his choice of climate, season, and sky. Stirring the fire until it throws a ruddy glow on the windows where the melancholy day weeps in monotonous despair, I may open Theocritus, and what to me are the fogs and mists of March on the Atlantic coast? I am in Sicily, and the olive and pine are green, sky and sea meet in a line so blue that I know not whether it be water or atmosphere; the cicada whirs; the birds stir in the little wood; and from the distance come the notes of the shepherd's pipe. All this is mine if I choose to stretch out my hand and open a little book -all this and a hundred other shining skies north and south, east and west. need not spend a minute with this March day if I choose to open any one of these

I

countless doors of escape. I know the roads well, for I have often taken them when such mists as these that lie upon the woods and meadows have pressed too closely on my spirits.

But there is something to be learned from a dull day, and the wiser part is to stay and con the lesson. He who knows only brilliant skies has still to know some of the profoundest aspects behind which nature conceals herself. Corot's morning skies stir the imagination to its very depths; but so also do those noble etchings of Van Gravesande which report the blackness of night and storm about the lighthouse and the sombre mystery of the deep woods.

A dull day need not be a depressing day; depression always implies physical or moral weakness, and is, therefore, never to be tolerated so long as one can struggle against it. But a dull day a day without deep emotions, inspiring thought, marked events; a day monotonous and colourless; a day which proclaims itself neutral among all the conflicting interests of life, is a day to be valued. Such a day