am sure. A clue! a clue! a Hecatomb à la Pythagoras, if it unlabyrinth me.'

But this is no wayward imagining, no accident or access of poetic fever. All through these most personal and private musings on paper are shot with what, for want of a better definition, we must call the emotions and aspiration of the Guru. 'Good heavens !' he writes, 'that there should be anything and not nothing.' Again, he is for ever dwelling upon 'oneness,' upon the mystery that underlies the proverb 'Extremes meet,' and on the communion with God which is guaranteed by His omniscience. That deep intuition of our oneness,' he exclaims, and in the next note he draws a passionate comfort from the thought "Thou knowest." Oh! what a thought! Never to be friendless: never to be unintelligible.' Take, too, his outburst, 'If my researches are shadowy, what in the name of reason are you? or do you resign all pretence to reason, and consider yourself -nay, even that is a contradiction-as a passive 0 among nothings?' How often, when some Western has interrogated the brooding East, has some such answer and reproof as this been returned? How marked, too, is the Guru element in the following passages:

We might as well attempt to conceive more than three dimensions of space as to imagine more than three kinds of living existence-God, man, and beast. And even of these the last (division) is obscure, and scarce endures a fixed contemplation without passing into an unripe or degenerated humanity.

Did you deduce your own being? Even this is less absurd than the conceit of deducing the Divine Being. Never would you have had the notion had you not had the idea—rather, had not the idea worked in you like the memory of a name

which we cannot recollect, and yet feel that we have, and which reveals its existence in the mind only by a restless anticipation, and proves its à priori actuality by the almost explosive instantaneity with which it is welcomed and recognised on its re-emersion out of the cloud, or its re-ascent from the horizon of consciousness.

So far from deeming it, in a religious point of view, criminal to spread doubts of God, immortality and virtue (that 3—1) in the minds of individuals, I seem to see in it a duty-lest men, by taking the words for granted, never attain the feeling or the true faith. They only forbear, that is, even to suspect that the idea is erroneous or the communicators deceivers, but do not believe the idea itself. Whereas to doubt has more of faith, nay, even to disbelieve, than that blank negation of all such thoughts and feelings which is the lot of the herd of churchand-meeting-trotters.

How like an Eastern sage, too, was Coleridge's habit of illustration and parable, his love for aphorism and apophthegm, and his apparent belief that words might somehow convey more than the mere meaning which they could be demonstrated to express !

But if it is easy to show that Coleridge had in reality the mind of a Guru, it is, alas! no less easy to show that he was a ruined a more than slightly damaged— Eastern sage. The long distraction and disorder of his life proves that. His life was not that of a Guru, but of a man tormented by the world and, though not in the most fleshly sense, ruined by the flesh. Whether in reality he might have attained to the secret to which he believed he had come so near we dare not presume to say. But at least it is clear that he would have done better had he absented himself from the earthly felicities of hearth and home-felicities for which he was so ill

designed and from the clash of the world, and had tried to lead the life of the Eastern sage. Had he learned to subdue the passions, and desires, and affections, how much more calmly and clearly would he have seen and reasoned. His misfortunes, both as a man and sage, seem, indeed, to point to the truth that there are still uses for the ascetic mode of life.

But though we may hold that Coleridge and those formed like him would be better were they deliberately to free themselves from the trammels of the world, we by no means hold that the ascetic life—the life that is of positive and direct asceticism-can ever be in the truest sense the higher life. He may do well who gives his soul full play by the methods of the Guru, but he does better who lives in the world and shares its burdens and its cares-who belongs to that band whose one bond is that all have been 'unspotted from the world,' who lives the common life and yet keeps his eyes undimmed. To live the higher life in the world, not the ascetic life outside it, is the ideal. And was not this after all the lesson taught in Syria nigh two thousand years ago? Christ was not a Guru, and did not live among the Essenes ; but ate and drank as other men, and lived the life of a Galilean. Coleridge was, no doubt, a damaged Guru; and might have been an undamaged one had he lived the life of the Guru; but, though we say this, let no one suppose that we put forward the Eastern sage and mystic as the ideal of spiritual life.

AMERICAN OPTIMISM

THE Englishman over the water in New England, considered as a man, and in isolation, seems to differ very little from the Englishman in Great Britain. We are all subjects of King Shakespeare, and all guided by much the same rules of conduct and ways of looking at life. What is honourable to one is honourable to the other, and both condemn the same acts as dishonourable. When, however, we come to compare the general spirit of the English-speaking man in the New World with that of the English-speaking man at home we note a real difference a distinct divergence. The ruling passion of the two peoples is seen to be different, and the American spirit stands out as something separate and apart.

What are the characteristics which mark off the American spirit? To begin with, there is a tolerance of things unseemly and unmeet, inconvenient and even wrong per se, which is not to be found here.

This tolerance is observable everywhere in America and in everything, from badly paved streets to courts of Justice so inefficient that even the best citizens have to organise lynching parties. Burke said, 'I must bear with inconveniences till they fester into crimes.' The American carries out this principle far too thoroughly.

The festering point with him is put so high that it is almost impossible to get him to admit that toleration is no longer possible. Things which would make other nations mad with rage, and in an instant, he endures for years almost without a groan. The American does not like corrupt and inefficient municipalities, has no preference for seeing city property flung away piecemeal, and would prefer properly paved streets; but, when he does not get them, instead of making a fuss and insisting on a change, he quietly submits, in the pious hope that things will get properly fixed some day.

To understand the cause of this tolerance is to understand the American. It is the tolerance, not of weariness, or cynicism, or lack of interest, but of optimism. The American cannot find it in his heart to be energetically angry over public inconveniences, because he is so profoundly impressed with the belief that things will come right in the end. In the true American there is not an atom of pessimism anywhere. You may talk to him till doomsday, but you shall never convince him that there is any real risk of things going permanently wrong. He will admit any amount of superficial wrongs, but at the back of his mind is the conviction that things are bound to worry through-a conviction which has come to have all the force and influence of an instinct. This colossal hopefulness, this essential and ineradicable optimism, makes it seem foolish to bother about little things. The Englishman is forced not to tolerate social or political wrongs because he has always the feeling that it is conceivable the social fabric may collapse and the nation go to ruin.