thoroughly knows more about the Greeks than he who has familiarised himself with all the work of the archæologist and philologist and historians of the Homeric age; the man who has mastered Dante has penetrated the secret of mediævalism; the man who counts Shakespeare as his friend can afford to leave most other books about Elizabeth's England unread. To really know Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, and Goethe is to know the best the world has thought and said and done, is to enter into that inheritance of experience and knowledge which is the truest, and at bottom the only, education. Most of us know too many writers, and waste our strength in a vain endeavour to establish relations of intimacy with a multitude of men, great and small, who profess to have some claim upon us. It is both pleasant and wise to have a large acquaintance, to know life broadly and at its best; but our intimate friends can never, in the nature of things, be many. We may know a host of interesting peo ple, but we can really live with but a few. And it is these few and faithful ones whose names I see in the dying light of the old year and the first faint gleam of the new. CHAPTER VIII A SCHOLAR'S DREAM HE delicate hands of the little clock on the mantel indicated that thirty minutes had passed since the musical chimes within had rung eleven. The open fire below was burning brightly, for the flame had eaten into the heart of the back log, and was transmuting its slow, rich growth into a warm glow that touched the outlines of the room with a soft splendour and made a charming picture of its mingled lights and shadows. The learning of the world rose tier above tier on the shelves that filled the space between floor and ceiling, and following the lines. of gold lettering along the unbroken rows, one read august and imperial names in the kingdom of thought. An ample writingtable, piled high with pamphlets and books, stood in the centre of the room, and the loose sheets of paper carelessly thrown together gave evidence of a work only recently interrupted. Without, the solemn silence of midnight and the radiant stars brooded over the stainless fields, white with freshly fallen snow. Ralph Norton had been looking into the fire these thirty minutes in a meditation that was almost wholly pathetic. His seventy years passed in swift procession before him, coming up one by one out of the invisible past, and pronouncing an inaudible judgment upon his career. There was a presence of indefinable and unusual solemnity in the time, for it was the close of a century, and in a brief half-hour another hundred years would be rounded to completion. By the common judgment of the thinking world, Ralph Norton was the foremost man of his age; no other had felt its doubts so keenly, or drank in its inspiration with such a mighty thirst as he. His thought had searched into its secret places and mastered all its wisdom; his heart had felt its deep pulsations in the solitude of unbroken and heroic studies; his genius had given its spirit a voice of matchless compass and eloquence. For half a century the world had laid his words. to heart, and built its faith upon his thinking. While the busy tides of activity ebbed and flowed through the great channels of civilisation, he had lived apart in a deep, earnest, and whole-hearted consecration to truth. The clearly cut features, the keen, benignant eyes, the noble poise of head, the wistful expression as of one striving to pierce the heart of some mystery, were signs of a personality that had left its impress on two generations, and now, in its grand maturity, was still waiting for some larger fulfilment of the promise of life. Behind him, among the throng of books, indistinguishable in the dim light, were the works into which the life of his life had gone. They recorded explorations into many fields, they had torn down old faiths amid storms of discussion and condemnation, they had laid new foundations for belief in the silence of meditative and self-forgetful years. The |