Think of the odd quarter of an hour in the morning before breakfast, the odd half-hour after breakfast, remember the chance to read, or figure, or think with concentration on your own career, that comes now and again in the day. All of these opportunities are the by-products of your daily existence. leading theology. Do not feed children on a maudlin sentimentalism or dogmatic religion; give them Nature. Let their souls drink in all that is pure and sweet. Rear them, if possible, amid pleasant surroundings. If they come into the world with souls groping in darkness, let them see and feel the light. Do not terrify them in early life with the fear of an after All these I hate-war and its panoply, The toil of peasants through the burdened years, Use them, and you may find what many The legacy of long disease that preys Until it shrivel with its votaries That nevermore Its dreadful call of murder may be heard; From blood-drenched shore to shore! HAT is the good of prescribing to art the roads that it must follow To do so is to doubt art, which develops normally according to the laws of Nature, and must be exclusively occupied in responding to human needs. Art has always shown itself faithful to Nature, and has marched with social progress. The ideal of beauty can not perish in a healthy society; we must then give liberty to art, and leave her to herself. Have confidence in her; she will reach her end, and if she strays from the way she will soon reach it again; society itself will be the guide. No single artist, not Shakespeare himself, can prescribe to art her roads and aims.-Dostoievski. world. Never was a child made more absorbs the sunshine and the dew. -Luther Burbank. BOVE the indistinguishable roar of the many feet I feel the presence of the sun, of the immense forces of the universe, and beyond these the sense of the eternal now, of the immortal. Full aware that all has failed, yet, side by side with the sadness of that knowledge, there lives on in me an unquenchable belief, thought burning like the sun, that there is yet something to be found, something real, something to give each separate personality sunshine and flowers in its own existence now. Something to shape this million-handed labor to an end and outcome, leaving accumulated sunshine and flowers to those who shall succeed. It must be dragged forth by might of thought from the immense forces of the universe.-Richard Jeffries. There is a chord in every heart that has a sigh in it if touched aright.-Ouida. HERE is one beautiful sight in the East End, and only one, and it is the children dancing in the street when the organ-grinder goes his round. It is fascinating to watch them, the new-born, the next generation, swaying and stepping, with pretty little mimicries and graceful inventions all their own, with muscles that move swiftly and easily, and bodies that leap airily, weaving rhythms never taught in dancing school. I have talked with these children, here, there, and everywhere, and they struck me as being bright as other children, and in many ways even brighter. They have most active little imaginations. Their capacity for projecting themselves into the realm of romance and fantasy is remarkable. A joyous life is romping in their blood. They delight in music, and motion, and color, and very often they betray a startling beauty of face and form under their filth and rags. But there is a Pied Piper of London Town who steals them all away. They disappear. One never sees them again, or anything that suggests them. You may look for them in vain among the generation of grown-ups. Here you will find stunted forms, ugly faces, and blunt and stolid minds. Grace, beauty, imagination, all the resiliency of mind and muscle, are gone. Sometimes, however, you may see a woman, not necessarily old, but twisted and deformed out of all womanhood, bloated and drunken, lift her draggled skirts and execute a few grotesque and lumbering steps upon the pavement. It is a hint that she was once one of those children who danced to the organ-grinder. Those grotesque and lumbering steps are all that is left of the promise of childhood. In the befogged recesses of her brain has arisen a fleeting memory that she was once a girl. The crowd closes in. Little girls are dancing beside her, about her, with the pretty graces she dimly recollects, but can no more than parody with her body. Then she pants for breath, exhausted, and stumbles out through the circle. But the little girls dance on. The children of the Ghetto possess all the qualities which make for noble manhood and womanhood; but the Ghetto itself, like an infuriated tigress turning on its young, turns upon and destroys all these qualities, blots out the light and laughter, and moulds those it does not kill into sodden and forlorn creatures, uncouth, degraded, and wretched below the beasts of the field.-Jack London. W HEN we succeed in adjusting our social structure in such a way as to enable us to solve social questions as fast as they become really pressing, they will no longer force their way into the theater. Had Ibsen, for instance, had any reason to believe that the abuses to which he called attention in his prose plays would have been adequately attended to without his interference, he would no doubt have gladly left them alone. The same exigency drove William Morris in England from his tapestries, his epics, and his masterpieces of printing, to try and bring his fellow-citizens to their senses by the summary process of shouting at them in the streets and in Trafalgar Square. John Ruskin's writing began with Modern Painters, Carlyle began with literary studies of German culture and the like; both were driven to become revolutionary pamphleteers. If people are rotting and starving in all directions, and nobody else has the heart or brains to make a disturbance about it, the great writers must. -George Bernard Shaw. Ꮽ Ꮽ VERY one now believes that there is in a man an animating, ruling, characteristic essence, or spirit, which is himself. This spirit, dull or bright, petty or grand, pure or foul, looks out of the eyes, sounds in the voice, and appears in the manners of each individual. It is what we call personality. -Chas. W. Eliot. Sleep hath its own world, a boundary between the things misnamed death and existence.-Byron. Reason is the life of the law.-Coke. DON'T know what I would and most of the suffering in the world. -Brand Whitlock. Ꮽ Ꮽ E with favor, folk of many families and nations, gathered together in the peace of this roof; weak men and women, subsisting under the covert of Thy patience. Be patient still; suffer us yet beseech Thee, Lord, to behold us So he died for his faith. That is fine, had only that time to live, I should like In this way he would have that education, that culture which comes of the highest quality of imagination, and that quality, I take it, has been most perfectly exemplified in the poets and saviors of the race, in that they were That he lived for it, too? In his death he bore witness at last For a wish or a whim— But to live-every day to live out All the truth that he dreamt, And the world with contempt. Then we'll talk of the life that he lived. "Life and Death," by Ernest Crosby able to feel and suffer what others were feeling and suffering, and when we come to a time when we realize just what the other fellow is suffering we will be moved by the desire to help him, and when we are moved by the desire to help him we come to a time when we see that this help must be administered intelligently, and ultimately we realize that it is the denial of equality, the denial of liberty, political and economic, in the world which is the cause of most of its suffering. If we had a world made up of people possessing this quality of imagination, this kind of culture, we would soon do away with the causes of involuntary poverty, and to do away with involuntary poverty would mean to do away with practically all the crime and vice awhile longerwith our broken purposes of good, with our idle endeavors against evil-suffer us awhile longer to endure, and (if it may be) help us do better. Bless to us our extraordinary mercies; if the day come when these must be taken, have us play the man under affliction. Be with our friends; be with ourselves. Go with each of us to rest; if any awake, temper to them the dark hours of watching; and when the day returns to us, our HE so-called artistic temperament explains the failure of innumerable talented men and women who never get over the frontier line of accomplishment. Symptoms of the artistic temperament should be fought to the death. Work, work, whether you want to or not. I throw away a whole day's work sometimes, but the simple effort of turning It is portentous, and a thing of state Near the old court-house pacing up and down. Or by his homestead, or in shadowed yards He lingers where his children used to play, Or through the market, on the wellworn stones He stalks until the dawn-stars burn away. A bronzed, lank man! His suit of ancient black, A famous high top-hat and plain worn shawl Make him the quaint great figure that men love, The prairie-lawyer, master of us all. He can not sleep upon his hillside now. He is among us:—as in times before! And we who toss and lie awake for long Breathe deep, and start, to see him pass the door. (Concluded on next page) We may not pay him reverence, for that would be indiscreet, but we can at least respect his talents. A person who has for untold centuries maintained the imposing position of spiritual head of four-fifths of the human race, and political head of the whole of it, must be granted the possession of executive abilities of the loftiest order. In his large presence the other popes and politicians shrink to midgets for the microscope. I would like to see him. I would rather see him and shake him by the tail than any other member of the European Concert. -Mark Twain. it out has kept my steam up and prevented me from lagging behind. You can not work an hour at anything without learning something. The matter of giving life to the pages of a novel is the result of industrious study of human beings. Writing is the result of thinking about things to write about and studying the details of contemporaneous life, so that you may set them down, not imaginatively but accurately. David Graham Phillips. F we are Itempted to tempted to make war upon another nation, we shall remember that we are seeking to destroy an element of our own culture, and possibly its most important element. As long as war is regarded as wicked, it will always have its fascination. When it is looked upon as vulgar, it will cease to be popular. -Oscar Wilde. OU cannot force the growth of human life and civilization, any more than you can force these slow-growing trees. Thatisthe economy of Almighty God, that all good growth is slow growth.—Gaynor. HAT distinguishes war is, injustice, the treachery, the murderous hand of man. OW the universal heart of man blesses flowers! They are wreathed round the cradle, the marriage-altar and the tomb. The Persian in the Far East delights in their perfume, and writes his love in nosegays; while the Indian child of the Far West claps his hands with glee as he gathers the abundant blossoms -the illuminated scriptures of the His head is bowed. He thinks on men Yea, when the sick world cries, how Too many peasants fight, they know Too many homesteads in black terror weep. The sins of all the war-lords burn his heart. He carries on his shawl-wrapped shoulders now The evil is moral evil. War is the concentration of all human crimes. Here is its distinguishing, accursed brand. Under its standard gather violence, malignity, rage, fraud, perfidy, rapacity and lust. If it only slew men, it would do little. It turns man into a beast of prey. Here is the evil of warthat man, made to be the brother, becomes the deadly foe of his kind; that man, whose duty it is to mitigate suffering, makes the infliction of his suffering his study and end; that man, whose office it is to avert and heal the wounds which come from Nature's powers, makes researches into Nature's laws, and arms himself with her most awful forces, that he may become the destroyer of his race. The bitterness, the folly and the pain. He can not rest until a spirit-dawn The league of sober folk, the Workers' Bring long peace to Cornland, Alp and Sea. It breaks his heart that kings must murder That all his hours of travail here for men white peace That he may sleep upon his hill again? Nor is this all. There is also found in war a cold-hearted indifference to human miseries and wrongs, perhaps more shocking than the bad passions it calls forth. To my mind, this contempt of human nature is singularly offensive. To hate expresses something like respect. But in war, man treats his brother as nothing worth; sweeps away human multitudes as insects; tramples them down as grass; mocks at the rights, and does not deign a thought to their woes. -William Ellery Channing. by Vachel Lindsay prairies.The Cupid of the ancient Hindoos tipped his arrows with flowers, and orange-flowers are a bridal crown with us, a nation of yesterday. Flowers garlanded the Grecian altar, and hung in votive wreath before the Christian shrine. All these are appropriate uses. Flowers should deck the brow of the youthful bride, for they are in themselves a lovely type of marriage. They should twine round the tomb, for their perpetually renewed beauty is a symbol of the resurrection. They should festoon the altar, for their fragrance and their beauty ascend in perpetual worship before the Most High.-L. M. Child. WHEN you get into a tight place and everything goes against you, till it seems as though you could not hold on a minute longer, never give up then, for that is just the place and time that the tide will turn.-Harriet Beecher Stowe. DESPISE not any man, and do not spurn anything; for there is no man that has nothis hour, nor is there anything that has not its place.-Rabbi Ben Azai. |