occupied with hopes and anxieties, and sometimes even struggling desperately against ruin. This is the life of the man; and this stirring career away from home renders home to him necessary as a place of repose, where he may take off his armor, relax his strained attention, and surrender himself to perfect rest. "But home is not this to a woman. It is not her retreat, but her battleground. She does not fly to its shelter as an escape from defeat or for a temporary lull; it is her arena, her boundary, her sphere. To a woman the house is life militant; to a man it is life in repose. She at home is armed with all her energies; he at home has thrown down his arms. She has no other sphere for her activities: ordering her household, subduing its rebellions, directing its affairs, make up her existence. She bustles, she stirs, she controls, she directs, she exhausts herself in, its demands, and then seeks for recreation and rest elsewhere. I am wearied,' says the husband; 'let me sit by the fire and smoke, and dream, and rest.' 'I am wearied,' says the wife; 'let me be refreshed by a visit to my friends, by an evening at the opera, at the theatre, at the concert.' "And so we see how a natural and radical antagonism may exist between man and wife as to the pleasures and the needs of home. Of course, in a vast majority of cases, these antagonisms are compromised. Between affectionate couples they never break out into warfare; but they assuredly exist, and two such distinct sets of ideas must be watched by both husband and wife if they would not have them the father of many discontents and much infelicity. Do you not see how woman, by the very necessities of her existence, must have a different idea of home than what man has?" "This," said Carriway, "is very like arguing that the play of 'Hamlet' is better with the part of Hamlet omitted. We all know the grace and charm women give to life; we all think with pleasure of that spot which woman renders an oasis in the desert of life." "Yes, my dear sir, we all think of that oasis because we love to contemplate it, because it is so essential to our happiness. We make an ideal home, and place an ideal woman in it; but, when the reality comes, how confoundedly often we are disappointed!" "Do you then mean to say, flatly, that celibacy is better than marriage?" asked Auger. "By no means. What I hope to do is to convince 'lovely woman' that, if we are to continue to marry her, she must endeavor to work up to our ideals of domestic felicity. She must try and find an outlet for her energies, so that at home she can fall into our luxuriousness, our love of repose, our enjoyment of supreme ease. You see women-I purposely do not use the word ladies-are very busy endeavoring to make a world of their 'pent-up Utica.' They sometimes are disposed to have it brilliant and animated; but too often, in blind servility to one of their gods, Propriety, make it very cold and orderly. The amount of absolute cheerlessness a woman can stand is my amazement." "Cheerlessness!" "Our "Yes, cheerlessness," replied the Bachelor, emphatically. women have an affection for flowers, ribbons, laces, silks, music, pets; but are singularly insensible to cheerlessness. They like dark rooms. They prefer heat from a hole in the wall rather than from a bright blaze. They ask you to dine under a dim jet of gas. They will shiver through a cold storm in autumn, rather than light a fire a day earlier than the almanac permits. A woman may have all the known virtues of her class; all the gentleness, humility, grace, domestic virtue, poets have sung about-and yet, if you should ask for a blaze on the hearth on a dark, wet, chilly day in September, ten chances to one the request would be too much for her patience. "Some women," continued the Bachelor, finding that no one interrupted him, "are slovenly-let us hope not many-I have seen untidy toilets, though; but, when a woman is not slovenly, she is often so neat, trim, precise, methodical, and circumspect, that she excludes all color, all freedom, all tone from her house. Upon all forms of untidiness such a woman makes tempestuous warfare. Now, this is utterly destructive to domestic bliss-an essential element of which is ease and a sense of completeness. One cannot be content if always under the smell of soapsuds, or if ceaselessly disturbed by the bustle of administration. The ultimatum of a woman's household luxury is apt to be the satisfaction of saying, 'There is not a speck of dust to be seen.' But this negative idea of home will not do. It is not sufficient to say there is no dust, no disorder, no untidiness, no confusion. We must have active ideas at work. We must have colors and sounds and sights to cheer, to refine, to delight us. But, you see, to create a paradise of indolence, to fill the mind with an ecstasy of repose, to render home a heaven of the senses-women are usually too virtuous to do this. Daintiness in man takes an artistic form; in woman it assumes a formidable order, a fearful cleanliness, a precision of arrangement that freeze us." "But all this," broke in Carriway, "is no longer the case. There was a time, no doubt, when your picture would have been strictly true. But now art has entered the house; color, banished by Puritan asceticism, has reasserted itself. Do we not see on every hand the new arts and the new devices for making home beautiful?" "For making home a museum!" growled the Bachelor. "Yes, there is now a craze for what is called household art, but it is for the most part only a new form of cheerlessness, a passion for making the parlor a show-room, the splendor of which must not be touched and scarcely looked upon save by the outside world. It is art for Mrs. Grundy, and not for the inmates of the house. Mrs. Grundy is the power of powers. If a woman has only two rooms in the world, one of these is furnished, garnished, set in order, and kept for the approbation of that venerable lady. Domestic comfort must live elsewhere than in the apartments devoted to this lady-who exacts of all her devotees velvet carpet that must not be trod on, damask furniture that must not be sat on, and all forms of finery that must not be warmed by good, honest fires, lest the dust alight on them, or opened to the pleasant rays of the sun, lest his beams fade them. The disorder that sometimes is held up as domestic comfort I feel no sympathy with; domestic bliss is to my taste firstcousin to elegance, and an elegance that enters into one's daily being. Unless one is a man of wealth it is better to banish set-up conventional parlors altogether, live and dine in the best apartment, and, seated among books, pictures, and the best furniture, invoke peace and comfort. Give us, I emphatically say, in our households color and cheeriness-not cold art nor cold pretensions of any kind, but warmth, brightness, animation. Bring in pleasing colors, choice pictures, bric-à-brac, and what-not; but let in also the sun; light the fires; and have everything for daily use." "You have omitted one important thing," remarked Carriway. "What is that?" "Love!" "Ah! that is something which bachelors, however agreeable they may make their apartments, must often sigh for. But love flourishes well when such notions as I have advanced are heeded; and then, men are such devotees of the senses, that so fair and delicate a thing as love will perish if women do not look well to make it a companion of domestic felicity." George Perry. BORN in Richmond, Mass., 1828. DIED in New York, N. Y., SIVA, DESTROYER. 1888. [Written shortly before his death.-The Home Journal. 1888.] Proud kings, whose lightest breath To men is life or death, Heeds he your ruth or wrath? Mother with bleeding breast Bowed o'er thy birdling's nest, Maiden with eyes of love Youth of the lion heart, Brave for life's noblest art, Shall fame's fair glory thwart Earth, in thy sweet array, Bride of celestial day, Hast thou one bloom to stay Stars on the dome of night, What voice shall say him nay, Hiram Corson. BORN in Philadelphia, Penn., 1828. SPIRITUALITY A TEST OF LITERATURE. [An Introduction to the Study of Robert Browning's Poetry. 1886.] LITERATURE, in its most restricted art-sense, is an expression in letters of the life of the spirit of man coöperating with the intellect. Without the coöperation of the spiritual man, the intellect produces only thought; and pure thought, whatever be the subject with which it deals, is not regarded as literature, in its strict sense. For example, Euclid's "Elements," Newton's "Principia," Spinoza's "Ethica," and Kant's Critique of the Pure Reason," do not properly belong to literature. (By the "Spiritual" I would be understood to mean the whole domain of the emotional, the susceptible or impressible, the sympathetic, the intuitive; in short, that mysterious something in the constitution of man by and through which he holds relationship with the essential spirit of things, as opposed to the phenomenal of which the senses take cognizance.) The term literature is sometimes extended in meaning (and it may be so extended) to include all that has been committed to letters, on all subjects. There is no objection to such extension in ordinary speech, no more than there is to that of the signification of the word "beauty" to what is purely abstract. We speak, for example, of the beauty of a mathematical demonstration; but beauty, in its strictest sense, is that which appeals to the spiritual nature, and must, therefore, be concrete, personal, not abstract. Art beauty is the embodiment, adequate, effective embodiment, of coöperative intellect and spirit-"the accommodation," in Bacon's words, "of the shows of things to the desires of the mind." It follows that the relative merit and importance of different periods of a literature should be determined by the relative degrees of spirituality which these different periods exhibit. The intellectual power of two or more periods, as exhibited in their literatures, may show no marked difference, while the spiritual vitality of these same periods may very distinctly differ. And if it be admitted that literature proper is the product of coöperative intellect and spirit (the latter being always an indispensable factor, though there can be no high order of literature that is not strongly articulated, that is not well freighted, with thought), it follows that the periods of a literature should be determined by the ebb and flow of spiritual life which they severally register, rather than by any other considerations. There are periods which are characterized by a "blindness of heart," an inactive, quiescent condition of the spirit, by which the intellect is more or less divorced from the essential, the eternal, and it directs itself to the shows of things. Such periods may embody in their literatures a large amount of thought, thought which is conversant with the externality of things; but that of itself will not constitute a noble literature, however perfect the forms in which it may be embodied, and the general sense of the civilized world, independently of any theories of literature, will not regard such a literature as noble. It is made up of what must be, in time, superseded; it has not a sufficiently large element of the essential, the eternal, which can be reached only through the assimilating life of the spirit. The spirit may be so |