tints are gone, as if the autumnal rains had washed them out. Orange, yellow and scarlet, all are changed to one melancholy russet hues The birds, too, have taken wing, and have left their roofless dwellings. Not the whistle of a robin, not the twitter of an eavesdropping swallow, not the carol of one sweet, familiar voice. All gone. Only the dis Serene, I fold my hands and wait, I stay my haste, I make delays: T is not possible to have the Asleep, awake, by night or day, What matter if I stand alone? The waters know their own, and draw The stars come nightly to the sky, IT is the Indian summer. The rising sun blazes through the misty air like a conflagration. A yellowish, smoky haze fills the atmosphere, and a filmy mist lies like a silver lining on the sky. The wind is soft and low. It wafts to us the odor of forest leaves, that hang wilted on the dripping branches, or drop into the stream. Their gorgeous mal cawing of a crow, as he sits and curses that the harvest is over; or the chit-chat of an idle squirrel, the noisy denizen of a hollow tree, the mendicant friar of a large parish, the absolute monarch of a dozen acorns. -Longfellow. WHAT moods, what passions, what nights of despair and gathering storms of anger, what sudden cruelties and amazing tendernesses are buried and hidden and implied in every love story! What a waste is there of exquisite things! So each spring sees a million glorious beginnings, a sunlit heaven in every opening leaf, warm perfection in every stirring egg, hope and fear and beauty beyond computation in every forest tree; and in the autumn before the snows come they have all gone-of all that incalculable abundance of life, of all that hope and adventure, excitement and deliciousness, there is scarcely more to be found than a soiled twig, a dirty seed, a dead leaf, black mould, or a rotting feather. -H. G. Wells. Ꮽ Speech is the index of the mind.-Seneca. War I do abhor; And yet how sweet tuppence worth of social position, piety, comfort, and domestic affection, of which he, too, is often ironically defrauded by Fate.-George Bernard Shaw. I HE tradition of the stage is The sound along the marching street .... WAS passing along the street when a beggar, a decrepit old man, stopped me. ¶ Swollen, tearful eyes, blue lips, bristling rags, unclean sores. Oh, how horribly had poverty gnawed that unhappy being! He stretched out to me a red, bloated, dirty hand. . He moaned, he bellowed for help. I began to rummage in all my pockets. . Neither purse, nor watch, nor even handkerchief did I find... I had taken nothing with me. Without a soul-save this bright treat And what care I for human Life! Oh, it is wickedness to clothe Till good men love the thing they loathe; And the beggar still waited...and extended his hand, which swayed and trembled feebly. Bewildered,confused, I shook that dirty, tremulous hand heartily.... "Blame me not, brother; I have nothing, brother." The beggar man fixed his swollen eyes upon me; his blue lips smiled and in his turn he pressed my cold fingers. "Never mind, brother," he mumbled. "Thanks for this also, brother. This also is an alms, brother." O, snap the fife and still the drum, "The Illusions of War,” by Richard Le Gallienne melancholy duty to add that we sometimes find it hard to avoid a cynical suspicion that the balance of social advantage is on the side of gifted villainy, since we see the able villain, Mephistopheles-like, doing a huge amount of good in order to win the power to do a little daring evil, out of which he is as likely as not to be cheated in the end; whilst your normal respectable man will countenance, connive at, and grovel his way through all sorts of meanness, baseness, servility, and cruel indifference to suffering in order to enjoy a miserable O make my readers realize what a philosopher is, I can only say that I am a philosopher. If you ask incredulously, "How, then, are your articles so interesting?” I reply that there is nothing so interesting as philosophy, provided its materials are not spurious. For instance, take my own materials— humanity and the fine arts. Any studious, timorously ambitious bookworm can run away from the world with a few shelves full of history, essays, descriptions, and criticisms, and, having pieced an illusory humanity and art out of the effects produced by his library upon his imagination, build some silly systematization of his worthless ideas over the abyss of his own nescience. Such a philosopher is as dull and dry as you please; it is he who brings his profession into disrepute, especially when he talks much about art, and so persuades people to read him. Without having looked at more than fifty pictures in his life, or made up his mind on the smallest point about one of the fifty, he will audaciously take it upon himself to explain the development of painting from Zeuxis and Apelles to Raphael and Michelangelo 90 90 As to the way he will go on about music, of which he always has an awe-stricken conceit, it spoils my temper to think of it, especially when one remembers that musical composition is taught (a monstrous pretension) in this country by people who read scores, and never by any chance listen to performances. Now, the right way to go to workstrange as it may appear-is to look at pictures until you have acquired the power of seeing them. If you look at several thousand good pictures every year, and form some sort of practical judgment about every one of themwere it only that it is not worth troubling over-then at the end of five years or so you will, if you have a wise eye, be able to see what is actually in a picture, and not what you think is in it. Similarly, if you listen critically to music every day for a number of years, you will, if you have a wise ear, acquire the power of hearing music. And so on with all the arts When we come to humanity it is still the same: only by intercourse with men and women can we learn anything about it. This involves an active life, not a contemplative one; for, unless you do something in the world, you can have no real business to transact with men; and unless you love and are loved, you can have no intimate relations with them. And you must transact business, wirepull politics, discuss religion, give and receive hate, love, and friendship with all sorts of people before you can acquire the sense of humanity. If you are to acquire the sense sufficiently to be a philosopher, you must do all these things unconditionally. You must not say that you will be a gentleman and limit your intercourse to this class or that class; or that you will be a virtuous person and generalize about the affections from a single instance-unless, indeed, you have the rare happiness to stumble at first upon an all-enlightening instance. You must have no convictions, because as Nietzsche puts it, convictions are prisons." Thus, I blush to add, you can not be a philosopher and a good man, though you may be a philosopher and a great one. You will say, perhaps, that if this be so, there should be no philosophers; and perhaps you are right; but though I make you this handsome concession, I do not defer to you to the extent of ceasing to exist. After all, if you insist on the hangman, whose pursuits are far from elevating, you may very well tolerate the philosopher, even if philosophy involves philandering; or, to put it another way, if, in spite of your hangman, you tolerate murder within the sphere of war, it may be necessary to tolerate comparatively venial irregularities within the sphere of philosophy IO It is the price of progress; and, after all, it is the philosopher, and not you, who will burn for it. -George Bernard Shaw. Several thousand years pass by like one minute. And the Finsteraarhorn rumbles in reply: "Dense clouds veil the earth .. Wait!" More thousands of years elapse, as it were one minute. "Well, what now?"inquires the Jungfrau. "Now I can see; down yonder, below, everything is still the same: partycolored, tiny. The waters gleam blue; the forests are black; heaps of stones piled up shine gray. Around them small beetles are still bustling,-thou knowest, those two-legged beetles who have as yet been unable to defile either thou or me.” Men?" E said, "I see." And they said: "He's crazy; crucify him." He still said: "I see." And they said: "He 's an extremist." And they tolerated him. And he continued to say: “ I see.” And they said: "He's eccentric." And they rather liked him, but smiled at him. And he stubbornly said again: "I see." And they said: "There's something in what he says.' ." And they gave him half an ear. But he said as if he'd never said it before: "I see. ." And at last they were awake; and they gathered about him and built a temple in his name. And yet he only said: "I see." And they wanted to do something for him. "What can we do to express to you our regret?" He only smiled. He touched them with the ends of his fingers and kissed them. What could they do for him?" Nothing more than you have done," he answered. And what was that? they wanted to know. "You see," he said, "that's reward enough; you see, you see."—"The Prophet," by Horace Traubel. EMBRANDT belongs to the breed terity. His place is with the Michelangelos, the Shakespeares, the Beethovens. An artistic Prometheus, he stole the celestial fire, and with it put life into what was inert, and expressed the immaterial and evasive sides of nature in his breathing forms.-Emile Michel. TEP by step my investigation of blindness led me into the industrial world. And what a world it is! I must face unflinchingly a world of facts a world of misery and degradation, of blindness, crookedness, and sin, a world struggling against the elements, against the unknown, against itself. How reconcile this world of fact with the bright world of my imagining? My darkness had been filled with the light of intelligence, and, behold, the outer day-lit world was stumbling and groping in social blindness. At first I was most unhappy; but deeper study restored my confidence By learning the sufferings and burdens of men, I became aware as never before of the lifepower that has sur HERE has arisen in society a figure which is certainly the most mournful, and in some respects the most awful, upon which the eye of the moralist can dwell. That unhappy being whose very name is a shame to speak; who counterfeits with a cold heart the transports of affection, and submits herself as the passive instrument of lust; who is scorned Life! we've been long together 'T is hard to part when friends Perhaps 't will cost a sigh, a Then steal away, give little Choose thine own time; "Life," by Anna Letitia Barbauld vived the forces of darkness-the power which, though never completely victorious, is continuously conquering. The very fact that we are still here carrying on the contest against the hosts of annihilation proves that on the whole the battle has gone for humanity. The world's great heart has proved equal to the prodigious undertaking which God set it. Rebuffed, but always persevering; self-reproached, but ever regaining faith; undaunted, tenacious, the heart of man labors towards immeasurably distant goals. Discouraged not by difficulties without, or the anguish of ages within, the heart listens to a secret voice that whispers: "Be not dismayed; in the future lies the Promised Land." -Helen Keller. Man is the merriest species of the creation; all above or below him are serious. -Addison. and insulted as the vilest of her sex and doomed, for the most part, to disease and abject wretchedness and an early death, appears in every age as the perpetual symbol of the degradation and sinfulness of man se Herself the supreme type of vice, she is ultimately the most efficient guardian of virtue. But for her, the unchallenged purity of countless happy homes would bepolluted, and not a few who, in the pride of their untempted chastity, think of her with an indignant shudder, would have known the agony of remorse and despair. On that one degraded and ignoble form are concentrated the passions that might have filled the world with shame. She remains, while creeds and civilizations rise and fall, the eternal priestess of humanity, blasted for the sins of the people.-William E. H. Lecky. |