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and American pens have taken up the burden of the refrain and set it to a varied and seductive music. The swan-song has become to many sensitive spirits a veritable siren melody, luring them away from all noble effort and action. These thoughts were in my mind as I gave the fire an energetic stirring to express my deep and growing aversion to the gospel of disillusion which is fast substituting for the prophetic dream of the imagination the nightmare of despair.

"I do not understand," I said, as I sank back into my easy-chair, "why men who write books will not occasionally look out of the windows of their libraries and take note of the bluebirds and the gleams of softened sky. We happen just now to be in a period of comparative barrenness in poetry. We have had within this present century a golden summer of marvellous fertility; one has to go back a good many seasons to recall another so prodigal of colour, so full of all manner of noble fruitage. There has followed a softened. but beautiful autumn, the aftermath of a cloudless day; and now has come the

inevitable winter of pause, silence, and apparent barrenness. Straightway the older men, recalling the glorious days of their youth, fall to moaning over the final disappearance of summer; and some of the younger men, chilled by the season and unable to rekindle the torches that have burnt out, join in the tragic chorus, and give themselves to the writing of epitaphs. of classical perfection of form and more. than classical coldness of temper. There are times when one feels as if most recent poetry had been written solely for mortuary purposes. The chill of death is on it; one's only consolation in reading it springs from the conviction that it is written over an empty tomb; and it must be confessed that grief has a hollow sound, even in verse of classical correctness, when one knows that the death which it laments with elegiac elegance has not actually taken place. For myself, I confess I am so weary of the funeral note of recent verse that I have gone back to Shakespeare with an almost rapacious appetite. An evening on Prospero's Island, with Ariel hovering in mid-air, the invisible messenger

of that Imagination which his master embodies, gives me back the old harmonies of hope and joy and life. The music of the sea that sings round that island is heard by few mariners in these melancholy days. It is significant that the greatest writers are never despondent or despairing. Such men as Homer and Shakespeare and Goethe were serene and joyous in a world whose deeper mysteries were far more real and pressing to them than to the minor singers of to-day. The trouble is not in the age, but in the men. The man who cannot be

strong, cheerful, creative, in his own age, would find all other ages inhospitable and barren."

Here I saw that Rosalind was about to speak, if she could get the opportunity, and I generously gave it to her.

"I quite agree with you," was her agreeable comment; "but what did you mean by saying at the beginning that writers ought to look out of their library windows oftener?"

"I'm glad you reminded me of my text," I answered. "The point of what I have been saying was in that remark.

In the world of thought, imagination, and feeling, seed-time and harvest are ordained quite as distinctly as in the world of fruits and flowers. There are epochs of splendid fertility, and there are epochs of sterility. It is by no accident that one age is silent and the next flooded with melody. The tide of creative impulse ebbs and flows. under a law which has not been discovered; but the return of the tide is no less certain than its ebb. Why, then, should men of talent wander up and down a beach from which the waters have receded, wringing their hands and adding a hollow moan to the mighty monotone of the sea because the tide will return no more? More than once, in other and parallel ages, these melancholy cries have been drowned by the incoming tides. Life is inexhaustible, and he must be blind indeed who does not see in the movements of to-day the possibilities of a future in which art shall come nearer than ever to human hearts, and add to its divine revelation of beauty some undiscovered loveliness."

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CHAPTER XXV

A BED OF EMBERS

HERE is no event in the household life so momentous as the coming of a friend; it is one of the events for which the home was built and in which its ideal is realised. "The ornament of a house," says Emerson, "is the friends who frequent it." Their character, culture, aims, reveal the law of its being; whether it stands for show, for mere luxury, or for large and noble living. "Honour to the house where they are simple to the verge of hardship; so that there the intellect is awake and reads the laws of the universe, the soul worships truth and love, honour and courtesy flow into all deeds." How easy it is to collect handsome furniture and crowd a house to suffocation with

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