garden in Surrey. In a place by themselves are six little volumes worn with much reading and with many journeyings. For many years they were the constant companions of one whose hand touched some of the deepest chords of life, and made a music of her own which the world will not soon forget. They speak to me sometimes with the clearness and authority of her own words, so many are the traces which she has left upon them of intimate fellowship. They have been read by the fjords of Norway and the lakes of Italy, and I never open them without feeling the presence of that eager and aspiring spirit to whom every day was an open door to a new truth and a fresh life. Indeed, I am never so near the world as in my study, nor do I ever feel elsewhere the burden and mystery of life coming in upon me with such awful and subduing power. There are hours when these laden shelves seem to me like some vast organ upon whose keys an unseen hand evokes the full harmony of life.

What a magical power of recalling past intellectual experiences familiar books pos

sess!-experiences that were the beginnings

of new epochs in our personal history. One may almost recount the growth of his mind by the titles of great books; the first reading of Carlyle's essay on "Characteristics," of Emerson's "Nature," of Goethe's "Faust," of Coleridge's "Literaria Biographica"-how the freshness and inspiration of those hours of dawning insight come back to one as he turns the well-worn leaves! It used to be regarded as a rare piece of good fortune to have the opportunity of loaning books to Coleridge; the great thinker always returned them with margins enriched with criticisms and comments and references often of far greater value than the text itself. A book so annotated, with the initials S. T. C. on every other page, became thereafter too precious ever to be loaned again. In like manner there are written on the margins of the books we have about us all manner of personal incident and history; no one reads these invisible records but ourselves, but to us they sometimes outweigh the book itself.

MONG the multitude of books which find their way to the light of my study fire there comes, at long intervals, one which searches my own consciousness to the depths and on the instant compels my recognition of that rare creation, a

true work of art. The inde

finable atmosphere, the incommunicable touch, of perfection are about and upon it, and one is suddenly conscious of a new and everlasting possession for the race. Such a book lies open before me; it is the "Journal Intime" of Henri Frédéric Amiel. "There is a point of perfection. in art," says La Bruyère, "as there is of goodness and ripeness in nature; he who feels and loves it has perfect taste; he who feels it not, and who loves some

thing beneath or beyond it, has faulty taste." The perfection which I feel in this book is something deeper and diviner than taste; it is a matter of soul, and must therefore remain undescribed. Like the flawless line of beauty, it will instantly reveal itself to those who have the instinct for art, and to those who fail to perceive it at the first glance it will remain forever. invisible. There is in some natures a quality of ripeness which makes all the hard processes of growth sweet and, in the general confusion of this workshop stage of life, gives us a sudden glimpse of perfection. Not that Amiel was a man of symmetrical character or life; in neither of these two master lines of action did he achieve anything like complete success; to himself, as to his best friends, he was but a promise, and at his death it seemed as if even the promise had failed. Nevertheless there was in this man of infirm will and imperfect development a quality of soul which must be counted rare at all times, and which, in this present era of bustle and energy, brings something of the surprise of a revelation with it. These

disconnected and unmethodical meditations, extending over a period of thirtythree years, are a kind of subtle distillation of life in which one feels in its finer essence the whole body of modern thinking and feeling. This "Journal Intime" is the sole fruit of a period of time long enough to contain the activities of a whole. generation; but how much more significant is the silence of such a book than the articulate speech of great masses of men! It is something that, at the bottom of this great restless ocean of modern life, such a pearl as this lay hid.

Amiel stands for a class of men of genius, of keenly receptive and intensely sensitive temperament; men like Joubert and Maurice de Guérin, whose lives are as rich on the side of thought as they are unproductive on the side of action. Such men teach almost as much through their defects as through their strength. Perhaps it is true that the quality of ripeness one finds in such natures is due to a preponderance of the ideal sufficient to destroy the balance of character. Men of this fibre absorb experience, and produce only scant