a feel or laugh, and certainly a drama which does not accomplish at least one of these results is a failure; but to combine all these qualities in the proper proportions in a single play demands the greatest ability, and few playwrights can accomplish it. Humor in the hands of an artist has an unfailing power to win an audience, and it is the best A murdered man, ten miles away, Will hardly shake your peace, The News It came along a little wire, It thins in the clubs to a little smoke UMOR has been defined as the salt of life. It is a caprice of our natures, or rather that quality which gives to ideas a ludicrous or fantastic turn, the effect of it being to excite the pleasurable emotions which we exhibit in laughter or mirth. Its unfailing power to win an audience is well known, and it is to this emotion that the amateur's attention is first attracted. It may take the form of a play of wit, sarcasm, satire, irony or the like; in any case, it is certain to meet with prompt response from the average audience. Comedy which is the term under which we class the different forms of humor, is therefore an essential element in drama. It does not deal with emotions that are heartsearching nor terrifying incidents, but trades rather in eccentricities of character and quaintness of manner; consequently, its chief dramatic use is to relieve the tension of a serious action. It is in this manner that it was used by the Elizabethan playwrights, who fully appreciated the tastes and weaknesses of their audience. However, comedy is not an absolute essential to the success of a play. Nearly all the best tragedies and certain of the most powerful dramas have not a ray of humor in them. The reason is not far to seek, for serious subjects, such as deal with the dignified and noble qualities of the human nature, admit only of a serious and earnest presentation. It has been said that the direct appeal of the drama is to make the audience think, The Diplomats Each was honest after his way, Lukewarm in faith, and old; And blood, to them, was only a word, And the point of a phrase their only sword, And the cost of war, they reckoned it OCIETY, SOCIE as we have constituted it, will have no place for me, has none to offer; but Nature, whose sweet rains fall on unjust and just alike, will have clefts in the rocks where I may hide, and sweet valleys in whose silence I may weep undisturbed. She will hang the night with stars so that I may walk abroad in the darkness without stumbling, and send the wind over my footprints so that none may track me to my hurt; she will cleanse me in great waters, and with bitter herbs make me whole.-Oscar Wilde. In little disks of gold. From "The Wine Press," by Alfred Noyes LIMB the mountains and get their good tidings. Nature's peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees. The winds will blow their own freshness into you, and the storms their energy, while cares will drop away from you like the leaves of Autumn.-John Muir. I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.-Thoreau. THANK Heaven, every Summer's day of my life, that my lot was humbly cast within the hearing of romping brooks, and beneath the shadow of oaks. And from all the tramp and bustle of the world, into which fortune has led me in these latter years of my life, I delight to steal away for days and for weeks together, and bathe my spirit in the freedom of the old woods, and to grow young again, lying upon the brookside and counting the white clouds that sail along the sky, softly and tranquilly, even as holy memories go stealing over the vault of life. I like to steep my soul in a sea of quiet, with nothing floating past me, as I lie moored to my thought, but the perfume of flowers, and soaring birds, and shadows of clouds. Two days ago, I was sweltering in the heat of the city, jostled by the thousand eager workers, and panting under the shadow of the walls. But I have stolen away, and for two hours of healthful regrowth into the darkling past, I have been this blessed Summer's morning lying upon the grassy bank of a stream that babbled me to sleep in boyhood. Dear, old stream, unchanging, unfalteringnever growing old-smiling in your silver rustle, and calming yourself in the broad, placid pools-I love you, as I love a friend!-Donald G. Mitchell. RUE love of country is not mere blind partisanship. It is regard for the people of one's country and all of them; it is a feeling of fellowship and brotherhood for all of them; it is a desire for the prosperity and happiness of all of them; it is kindly and considerate judgment toward all of them. The first duty of popular self-government is individual self-control. The essential condition of true progress is that it shall be based upon grounds of reason, and not of prejudice. Lincoln's noble sentiment of charity for all and malice toward none was not a specific for the Civil War, but is a living principle of action. -Elihu Root. ACH day it becomes more and more apparent that all questions in this country must be settled at the bar of public opinion. If our laws regulating large business concerns provide for proper and complete publicity-so that the labor of a concern will know what it is doing, so that the stockholders will know what is being done, and the public will have as much information as either -many of our present difficulties will disappear. In place of publicity being an element of weakness to a business concern, it will be an element of strength. -George W. Perkins. The fountains mingle with the river, DO not think that I exaggerate the importance or the charms of pedestrianism, or our need as a people to cultivate the art. I think it would tend to soften the national manners, to teach us the meaning of leisure, to acquaint us with the charms of the open air, to strengthen and foster the tie between the race and the land. No one else looks out upon the world so kindly and charitably as does the pedestrian; no one gives and takes so much from thecountry he passes through. Next to the laborer in the fields, the walker holds the closest relation to the soil; and he holds a closer and more vital relation to Nature because he is freer and his mind more at leisure. Man takes root at his feet, and at best he is no more than All things by a law divine See the mountains kiss high heaven, And the waves clasp one another; If it disdained its brother; And the moonbeams kiss the sea; by Percy Bysshe Shelley a potted plant in his house or carriage till he has established communication with the soil by the loving and magnetic touch of his soles to it. Then the tie of association is born; then those invisible fibers and rootlets through which character comes to smack of the soil, and which makes a man kindred to the spot of earth he inhabits. The roads and paths you have walked along in Summer and Winter weather, the meadows and hills which you have looked upon in lightness and gladness of heart, where fresh thought have come into your mind, or some noble prospect has opened before you, and especially the quiet ways, where you have walked in sweet converse with your friend -pausing under the trees, drinking at the spring-henceforth they are same; a new charm is added; te not thoughts a those spring there perennial, your friend walks there forever.-John Burroughs. inmost depths, and awakens a thousand memories which to all appearances have no connection whatever with the outward scene, but which, nevertheless, undoubtedly hold communion with the soul of Nature through sympathies that may be entirely unknown to us, because her methods seem to be beyond the touch of our thought-Maurice de Guerin. Ꮽ Ꮽ Y garden, with its silence and the pulses of fragrance that come and go on the airy undulations, affects me like sweet music. Care stops at the gates, and gazes at me wistfully through the bars. Among my flowers and trees, Nature takes me into her own hands, and I breathe freely as the first man. --Alexander Smith. E follow the stream of amber and bronze brawling along its bed with its frequent cascades and snow-white foam. Through the canyon we fly -mountains not only each side, but seemingly, till we get near, right in front of us every road a new view flashing, and each flash defying description-on the almost perpendicular sides, clinging pines, cedars, crimson sumach bushes, spruces, spots of wild grass-but dominating all, those towering rocks, rocks, rocks, bathed in delicate vari-colors, with the clear sky of Autumn overhead. New scenes, new joys, seem developed. Talk as you like, a typical Rocky Mountain canyon, or a limitless sea-like stretch of the great Kansas or Colorado plains, under favoring circumstances, tallies, perhaps expresses, certainly awakes, those grandest and subtlest elementemotions in the human soul, that all marble temples and sculptures from Phidias to Thorwaldsen-all paintings, poems, reminiscences or even music probably never can.-Walt Whitman. HE thing needed is not plans, but men. A well-thought-out plan without a man to execute it is a waste of money; and as a rule, the more comparatively the details have been thought out by a man who is not going to execute them himself, the larger will be the amount of money wasted. Get a man with a plan, and more money he has the greater is his chance of doing a larger work, but a plan without a man is as bad as a man without a plan the more he has the more he wastes.-Arthur T. Hadley. a HOSE who love Nature can never be dull. They may have other temptations; but at least they will run no risk of being beguiled, by ennui, idleness or want of occupation, " to buy the merry madness of an hour with the long peni tence of after-time." The love of Nature, again, helps us greatly to keep ourselves free from those mean and petty cares which interfere so much with calm and peace of mind. It turns every ordinary walk into a morning or evening sacrifice,' and brightens life until it becomes almost like a fairy-tale.-John Lubbock. E glad of life because it gives you the chance to love and to work and to play and to look up at the stars. -Henry Van Dyke. HOUGH not often consciously recognized, perhaps this is the great pleasure of Summer: to watch the earth, the dead particles, resolving themselves into the living case of life, to see the seed-leaf push aside the clod and become by degrees the perfumed flower. From the tiny, mottled egg come the wings that by and by shall pass the immense sea. It is in this marvelous transformation consult his friends upon an intended publication for a hundred and fifty years, and live to see his success afterwards; but at present, a man waits, and doubts, and consults his brother, and his particular friends, till one day he finds he is sixty years old and that he has lost so much time in consulting cousins and friends that he has no more time to follow their advice. Sydney Smith. E are told of the Chinese sage of clods and cold matter into living Mengtsen, that when he was a things that the joy and the hope of Summer reside. Every blade of grass, each leaf, each separate floret and petal is an inscription speaking of hope. Consider the grasses and the oaks, the swallows, the sweet, blue butterflythey are one and all a sign and token showing before our eyes earth made into life. So that my hope becomes as broad as the horizon afar, reiterated by each leaf, sung on every bough, reflected in the gleam of every flower. There is so gathered and enjoyed. Not for you or me, now, but for our race, who will ultimately use this magical secret for their happiness. Earth holds secrets enough to give them the life of the fabled Immortals. My heart is fixed firm and stable in the belief that ultimately the sunshine and the Summer, the flowers and the azure sky, shall become, as it were, interwoven into man's existence. He shall take from all their beauty and enjoy their glory.-Richard Jefferies. GREAT deal of talent is lost in the world for want of a little courage. Every day sends to their graves obscure men whom timidity prevented from making a first effort; who, if they could have been induced to begin, would in all probability have gone great lengths in the career of fame. The fact is, that to do anything in the world worth doing, we must not stand back shivering and thinking of the cold and danger, but jump in and scramble through as well as we can. It will not do to be perpetually calculating risks and adjusting nice chances; it did very well before the Flood, when a man would child, his mother's home was near a slaughter-house, and that she instantly left her home when she saw the child watching with indifference the pain inflicted upon animals. Her second home was near a graveyard, and again she left when she saw the boy imitating at his play the rites of superstition. -Dean Farrar. great thoughts, our great affecUR leave us. Surely they can not separate from our consciousness, shall follow it whithersoever that shall go, and are of their nature divine and immortal. -Thackeray. Ale never will reach his best until he walks the upward way side by side with woman. Plato was right in his fancy that man and woman are merely halves of humanity, each requiring the qualities of the other in order to attain the highest character. Shakespeare understood it when he made his noblest women strong as men, and his best men tender as women. The hands and breasts that nursed all men to life are scorned as the forgetful brute proclaims his superior strength and plumes himself so he can subjugate the one who made him what he is.-Eugene V. Debs. AN has not yet reached his best. Life is a fragment, a moment between two eternities, influenced by all that has preceded, and to influence all that follows. The only way to illumine it is by extent of view. -William Ellery Channing. |