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the passing flash of the sunlight; the vast current of thought, emotion, experience, flows on in darkness and silence. Like the tropical tree, civilisation must support each expansion by sending down a new trunk to that ancient earth which cradled our infancy and from whom we can never be long separated. In the midst of our highest refinements, and under the influence of our ripest culture, there comes to each of us that mood which Mr. Lang has so admirably expressed in his noble sonnet on "The Odyssey":

"As one that for a weary space has lain

Lulled by the song of Circe and her wine
In gardens near the pale of Proserpine,
Where that Ææan isle forgets the main,
And only the low lutes of love complain,
And only shadows of wan lovers pine,
As such an one were glad to know the brine
Salt on his lips, and the large air again—
So gladly, from the songs of modern speech

Men turn, and see the stars, and feel the free
Shrill wind beyond the close of heavy
flowers,

And through the music of the languid hours They hear like ocean on a western beach

The surge and thunder of the Odyssey.”

CHAPTER XXXIII

THE OPEN WINDOW

HAVE noticed that at the close of a long winter the opening of the windows makes my books look faded and dusty. Yesterday, with the bright firelight playing

upon them, they were fresh

and even brilliant; to-day, with the soft blue sky shining through the window, they are old and shabby. This singular transformation has taken place more than once in my experience, and as in each instance the spell has been wrought on the same books, I am forced to believe that the change is in me and not in my familiar volumes. In winter I find them opulent in life and warmth; I feel in them the throb of the world's heart-beat; but when spring comes and the warm airs are full of invitation to the senses and the imagination, they be

come suddenly meagre, artificial, and commonplace. They shrink from the strong sunlight, and in the affluent splendour of the summer they are the pale ghosts of their former selves.

The world of books is at best a world of shadows; one turns from it at times to drink anew and with unspeakable delight at the inexhaustible fountains of life. Commentaries are admirable in their place, but no true scholar ever permits them to stand long between his thought and the text; they help him in obscure passages, they light up dark and difficult sentences, but they are only aids; the text itself is always his supreme and final object. The man who goes to books instead of life, who gets his knowledge of humanity out of Shakespeare and of nature out of Wordsworth, will never know either profoundly. The Alps are more majestic than the noblest picture of them which artist ever put upon canvas, and men and women in the multiform relations of life more wonderful than any portraiture by the greatest dramatist. It is this mistake of taking the commentary for the text which makes most literary

men the slaves of art instead of the masters of life and its lessons; which fills their work with musical echoes and robs it of that mighty and commanding utterance which truth learned at first hand always finds for itself.

The library is at once a storehouse of treasures and a prison; its value depends entirely upon its use. If one's thought is hourly and patiently traversing the highways of human life, if one's heart penetrates with deep and abiding sympathy the small and the great experiences of men and women, one may use books and find nothing but light and power in them; they will discover relations which have escaped observation; they will bring within the horizon of thought vast and fertile tracts through which one has never been able to journey; they will suggest answers and solutions which will aid immeasurably in the comprehension of the great mysterious fact of life. But if one goes to books for fundamental conceptions, for that experience which one never really gets unless he acquires it at first hand, for those large, controlling views of things which ought

to be the creation of one's individual struggle with problems and difficulties and mysteries, they will prove inadequate and misleading teachers. No art can conceal or preserve that which has been borrowed from another; such second-hand creation often charms by its skill for a time, but its lack of vitality sooner or later makes it appear the barren, useless thing it is. No skill will save the picture which lacks the touch of nature, no art will give immortality to the book in which the pulse of life has never throbbed.

To-day the generous warmth of the sun has tempted me out of my study and beguiled me into hours of aimless wandering. I have seen the great expanse of water between the arching elms, and have noted, with a kind of exultation, that the trees are no longer leafless; the exquisite tracery of bare twig and branch is not so sharp of outline as when I saw it a week ago; a delicate colour suffuses itself over all, and blurs the edges that were sharp against the sky. A robin flashes across the stone wall, and yonder a medley of notes, dissonant with anger, betrays the

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