experience, to unlock the innermost chambers of the heart, to enter into all that life is and means, not only to one's self but to humanity. No human soul that comes to full self-knowledge escapes the penalty of growth into truth and power: the penalty of pain, of doubt and uncertainty, of misconceptions of spirit and purpose; of bitter struggle to make hard facts the helpers in the search and strife for freedom and fullness of life; of long waiting; of the sense of loneliness among one's fellows; of the slow achievement through faith and patience.

It has been said that the pathos of antique life lay in the contrast between the beauty of the world and man's few and broken years; and that the pathos of medieval life lay in the contrast between the same beauty become a manifold temptation, and the soul of man, a stranger amid its shows and splendors, lodged in a cell while the heavens were blue, scourged and fasting while birds and wind sang the universal song of joy and freedom. The pathos of all time and life is the contrast between the illimitable thirst and the unsatisfying draught, between the flying ideal and the lagging real, between the dream and the accomplishment, between aspiration and capacity and power on the one hand, and change, limitation, disease, and death on the other. Literature knows this pathos but too well; the pathos to which no great soul and no great life is ever alien.

The book has long since slipped from my hand, and a somber shadow seems to have quenched the

glow of the fire. Out of the window the world lies cold and cheerless; bitter winds are abroad; the leaden sky is hidden by a flurry of snow. Winter is supreme everywhere. But the faint color on the willows silently speaks of softer skies and golden weather!

THE early spring days come freighted with strange, vague longings; there is in them some subtle breath of the unconfined, universal life-spirit, which fills us with a momentary antagonism to all our habits, customs, and occupations, and inspires us with a desire to be free of all obligations, duties, and responsibilities. The primitive lawlessness in our blood seems to stir dimly with the first movements of life under the sod and within the silence of the woods. Some long-forgotten existence, antedating all our institutions and the very beginnings of society, is dimly reflected in the depths of consciousness, and makes us restless with desire to repossess ourselves of a lost knowledge, to recover a whole epoch of primitive experience faded to the vaguest of shadows in the memory.

I am not sure that Rosalind will enter into this mood, or that, if she should, she would think it profitable or healthful. I keep it to myself, therefore; feeling quite safe, within the circle of light which falls from the shaded lamp about her, from all heathenish and uncivilized impulses. Indeed, I think it would be better if we could feel, amid our intense

activities to-day, a little more of the pulse of the free and trustful life which lies like a forgotten page at the beginning of the great volume of human history. Progress and civilization are normal, healthful, inevitable; it takes very little knowledge and thought to detect the fundamental error in Rousseau's theories of the natural state of man, or in the occasional play of intellectual willfulness which declares for barbarism as more normal and noble than civilization. Nevertheless, there are certain things which men are likely to lose in the swift movement of modern life which have always been among their best possessions. Freshness of perception, a sensitive mental retina, openness to the unobtrusive but wonderfully significant procession of star and flower and storm-cloud-these are among the precious things which men have largely lost by the way. The intense retrospection of modern life has given us a marvelously rich literature of subjective observation and meditation; but we are in danger of missing the freshness, the joy, the poetic impressiveness of the world that lies within the empire of the senses. This thought was in Wordsworth's mind when he wrote that profound and moving

sonnet:

"The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:
Little we see in Nature that is ours;

We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This sea that bares her bosom to the moon ;

The winds that will be howling at all hours
And are up-gather'd now like sleeping flowers—

For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not. Great God! I'd rather be
A pagan suckled in a creed outworn,
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,

Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea,

Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn."

The note of revolt in these striking lines is not unfamiliar to men and women in whom the poetic mood survives and at times asserts itself with the momentary tyranny of a king who has forgotten that he is dethroned. In every healthful nature there must be an outlet into the ancient life of fresh impressions, of senses still unsubdued to the work of the calculating intellect, of impulses still vigorous with unspent vitality. It is to satisfy this craving that some men find themselves drawn irresistibly at times to the Odyssey, with its free, fresh life of movement and action; it is because the great race legends of the Scandinavian, the German, and the Celt have this breath of the morning upon them that they take possession of the imagination and stir such vague but passionate responses within us. It is to satisfy this craving, no doubt, that a young poet now and then gives rein to his imagination, and celebrates his freedom in verse better suited to Bacchic and other lost pagan moods than to modern ears; and, recalling the exuberant vitality of such a youth as Goethe's before it had learned that obedience is the only road