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 out has kept It is portentous, and a thing of state Near the old court-house pacing up and HAVE no special regard for Satan, but I can at least claim that I have no prejudice against him. It may even be that I have been a little in his favor, on account of his not having a fair show. All religions issue Bibles against him, but we never hear his side. We have none but the evidence for the prosecution, and yet we have rendered the verdict. To my mind this is irregular. It is un-English, it is un-American. Of course, Satan has some kind of a case, it goes without saying. It may be a poor one, but that is nothing; that can be said about any of us. As soon as I can get at the facts I will undertake his rehabilitation myself, if I can find an impolite publisher. It is a thing which we ought to do for anybody who is under a cloud se 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. (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. 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 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. That is the economy of Almighty God, that all good growth is slow growth.-Gaynor. HAT distinguishes war is, now the universal heart of man not that man is slain, but 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 injustice, the treachery, 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 bitterness, the folly and the pain. 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. 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 HE majesty of suffering labor is no longer dumb: it speaks now with a million tongues, and it asks the nations not to increase the ills which crush down the workers by an added burden of mistrust and hate, by wars and the expectation of wars. Gentlemen, you may ask how and when and in what form this longing for international concord will express itself to some purpose. . . . I can only answer you by a parable which I gleaned by fragments from the legends of Merlin, the magician, from the Arabian Nights, and from a book that is still unread. Once upon a time there was an enchanted forest. It had been stripped of all verdure, it was wild and forbidding. The trees, tossed by the bitter winter wind that never ceased, struck one another with a sound as of breaking swords. When at last, after a long series of freezing nights and sunless days that seemed like nights, all living things trembled with the first call of spring, the trees became afraid of the sap that began to move within them. And the solitary and bitter spirit that had its dwelling within the hard bark of each of them said very low, with a shudder that came up from the deepest roots:" Have a care! If thou art the first to risk yielding to the wooing of the new season, if thou art the first to turn thy lance-like buds into blossoms and leaves, their delicate raiment will be torn by the rough blows of the trees that have been slower to put forth leaves and flowers." break into a shower of verdure, and give from afar the signal for a renewal of all life? Or did a warmer and more lifegiving beam start the sap moving in all the trees at once? For lo! in a single day the whole forest burst forth into a magnificent flowering of joy and peace. -Jean Leon Jaurès. JOIN with you most cordially in rejoicing at the return of peace. I hope it will be lasting, and that mankind will at length, as they call themselves reasonable creatures, have reason enough to settle their differences without cutting throats; for, in my opinion, there never was a good war or a bad peace. What past additions to the conveniences and comforts of life might mankind have acquired, if the money spent in wars had been employed in works of utility! What an extension of agriculture, even to the tops of the mountains; what rivers rendered navigable, or joined by canals; what bridges, aqueducts, new roads, and other public works, edifices and improvements, rendering England a complete paradise, might not have been obtained by spending those millions in doing good, which in the last war have been spent in doing mischief-in bringing misery into thousands of families and destroying the lives of so many working people, who might have performed the useful labors. T -Franklin. And the proud and melancholy spirit is a glorious privilege to live, to 66 that was shut up within the great Druidical oak spoke to its tree with peculiar insistence: And wilt thou, too, seek to join the universal love-feast, thou whose noble branches have been broken by the storm?" Thus, in the enchanted forest, mutual distrust drove back the sap, and prolonged the death-like winter even after the call of spring. What happened at last? By what mysterious influence was the grim charm broken? Did some tree find the courage to act alone, like those April poplars that know, to act, to listen, to behold, to love. To look up at the blue summer sky; to see the sun sink slowly beyond the line of the horizon; to watch the worlds come twinkling into view, first one by one, and the myriads that no man can count, and lo! the universe is white with them; and you and I are here.-Marco Morrow. ELIEVE me, every man has his secret sorrows, which the world knows not; and oftentimes we call a man cold when he is only sad.-Longfellow. GE, that lessens the enjoy-HAT if I differ from some in relig ment of life, increases our gers which, in the vigor of youth, we had learned to despise, assume new terrors as we grow old. Our caution increasing as our years increase, fear becomes at last the prevailing passion of the mind, and the small remainder of ious apprehensions? Am I therefore incompatible with human societies? I know not any unfit for political society but those who maintain principles subversive of industry, fidelity, justice and obedience. Five things are requisite for a good officer; ability, clean hands, dispatch, patience and impartiality. The streets are full of human toys, And jealousies and fears. life is taken up in They move their eyes, their lips, their They are marvellously dressed; The toys are played with till they fall, the senses of every pleasure, equips imagination in the spoil? Life would be insupportable to an old man, who loaded with infirmities, feared death no more than when in the vigor of manhood: the numberless calamities of decaying Nature, and the consciousness of surviving every pleasure would at once induce him with his own hand to terminate the scene of misery: but happily the contempt of death forsakes him at a time when it could only be prejudicial, and life acquires an imaginary value in proportion as its real value is no more. -Oliver Goldsmith. He who would do some great thing in this short life must apply himself to work with such concentration of his forces as, to idle spectators, who live only to amuse themselves, looks like insanity. -Parkman. -William Penn. STRONG life is like that of a ship of war which has its own place in the fleet and can sharein its strength and discipline, but can also go forth alone to the solitude of the infinite sea. We ought to belong to society, to have our place in it and yet be capable of a complete individual existence outside of it. -P. G. Hamerton. APPINESS in this world, when it comes, comes incidentally. Make it the object of pursuit, and it leads us a wild-goose chase, and is never attained. Follow some other object, and very possibly we may find that we have caught happiness without dreaming of it; but likely enough it is gone the moment we say to ourselves, "Here it is!" like the chest of gold that treasure-seekers find. -Nathaniel Hawthorne. OR those who seek Truth and would follow her; for those who recognize Justice and would stand for her, success is not the only thing. Success! Why, Falsehood has often that to give; and Injustice often has that to give. Must not Truth and Justice have something to give that is their own by proper right— theirs in essence, and not by accident? That they have, and not here and now, every one who has felt their exaltation knows.-Henry George. HEN we say a man or a woman we know is a thorough-bred, we pay to him or her the greatest compliment of which we are capable. There is not in the vocabulary of pleasant terms a stronger word. Visit a stock-farm, the home of highgrade horses or cattle, and you will see that the physical signs of the thoroughbred are fine eyes and an erect bearing. These are the symbols of a high, generous spirit The keeper of the stock-farm will tell you that a thoroughbred never whines. One illustrated this to me by swinging a dog around by the tail. The creature was in pain, but no sound escaped him. "You see," said the keeper, they never complain. It ain't in 'em. Same way when a stable burns. It ain't the best horses that scream when they 're burnin'. It's the worst." 66 All this is quite as true of the human thoroughbred. The visible signs of the invisible spirit are the eyes that are steady and shoulders that are straight. No burden except possibly the weight of many years bends his shoulders, and his eyes meet yours in honest fashion, because he neither fears, nor has been shamed, at the bar of his own soul. He never complains. He keeps his troubles to himself, having discovered, as thoroughbreds do, that to tell troubles is to multiply them, and to lock them in the breast is to diminish and finally end them. He never talks about what Fate has done to him. He knows he is master of his own destiny. He never bewails the treatment he has received from another, for he knows no one can do him lasting harm except himself.—Ada Patterson. HE fact is, that civilization requires slaves. The Greeks were quite right there. Unless there are slaves to do the ugly, horrible, uninteresting work, culture and contemplation become almost impossible. Human slavery is wrong, insecure, and demoralizing. On mechanical slavery, on the slavery of the machine, the future of the world depends.-Oscar Wilde. (ODAY is your day and mine, the only day we have, the day in which we play our part. What our part may signify in the great whole we may not understand; but we are here to play it, and now is our time. This we know: it is a part of action, not of whining. It is a part of love, not cynicism. It is for us to express love in terms of human helpfulness.-David Starr Jordan. (HE perfect historian is he in whose work the character and spirit of an age is exhibited in miniature. He relates no fact, he attributes no expression to his characters, which is not authenticated by sufficient testimony By judicious selection, rejection and arrangement, he gives to truth those attractions which have been usurped by fiction. In his narrative a due subordination is observed: some transactions are prominent; others retire. But the scale on which he represents them is increased or diminished not according to the dignity of the persons concerned in them, but according to the degree in which they elucidate the condition of society and the nature of man. He shows us the court, the camp and the senate. But he shows us also the nation. He considers no anecdote, no peculiarity of manner, no familiar saying, as too significant for his notice which is not too insignificant to illustrate the operation of laws, of religion, and of education, and to mark the progress of the human mind. Men will not merely be described, but will be made intimately known to us. -Macaulay. HE ideal life is in our blood and never will be still. Sad will be the day for any man when he becomes contented with the thoughts he is thinking and the deeds he is doing,-where there is not forever beating at the doors of his soul some great desire to do something larger, which he knows that he was meant and made to do. -Phillips Brooks. He jests at scars that never felt a wound. -Shakespeare. 1 |