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 UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 
 
MY STUDY FIRE 
 
 BY 
 
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 HAMILTON WRIGHT MABIE 
 
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 NEW YORK 
 
 DODD, MEAD & COMPANY 
 
 1890 
 
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 Copyright, 1890, 
 
 BY 
 
 DODD, MEAD & COMPANY. 
 
 All rights reserved. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 
 I. The Fire Lighted, i ^ 
 
 II. Nature and Childhood, ... 8 
 
 III. The Answer of Life, - - - 16 
 
 IV. A Poet's Crown of Sorrow, - - 21 
 
 V. The Failings of Genius, - - - 29 
 
 VI. Christmas Eve, 35 
 
 VII. New Year's Eve, - - 42 
 
 VIII. 'A Scholar's Dream, - 47 
 
 IX. A Flame of Driftwood, 60 
 
 X. Dream Worlds, ..... 64 
 
 XL A Text from Sidney, ... - 71 
 
 XII. The Artist Talks, - 79 
 
 XIII. Escaping from Bondage, 84 
 
 XIV. Some Old Scholars, ... - 89 
 XV. Dull Days, 96 
 
iv CONTENTS. 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 
 XVI. The Universal Biography, - - 101 
 
 XVII. A Secret of Genius, ... - 107 1/ 
 
 XVIII. Books and Things, - - - - n 1 
 
 XIX. A Rare Nature, - - - - - 116 
 
 XX. The Cuckoo Strikes Twelve, - - 120 
 
 XXI. A Glimpse of Spring, .... 127 
 
 XXII. A Primeval Mood, - 134 
 
 XXIII. The Method of Genius, - - - 140 
 
 XXIV. A Hint from the Season, - - - 146 
 
 XXV. A Bed of Embers, 152 
 
 XXVI. A Day Out of Doors, - - - 159 
 
 XXVII. Beside the Isis, 166 
 
 XXVIII. A Word for Idleness - - - 173 
 
 XXIX. " The Bliss of Solitude," - - - 178 
 
 XXX. A New Hearth, 183 
 
 XXXI. An Idyl of Wandering, - - - 189 
 
 XXXII. The Open Window, 196 
 
MY STUDY FIRE. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 THE FIRE LIGHTED. 
 
 The lighting of the fire in my study is an event 
 of importance in the calendar of the domestic year ; 
 it marks the close of one season, and announces 
 the advent of another. There is always a touch of 
 pathos in the last warm autumnal days, that makes 
 the cordial acceptance of winter a kind of infidelity 
 to the months that have lavished their gifts of life 
 and beauty at our threshold. I am quite willing to 
 shiver at my writing-table on sharp autumnal morn- 
 ings in order that the final act of separation from 
 summer may be postponed a little. This year we 
 have been more than ever reluctant to sever the last 
 tie with a season which has befriended us as none 
 of its predecessors have ever done, and it was not 
 until a keen northwester shook the house yesterday 
 that we prepared the hearth for its annual fire. 
 The day broke cold and gray, with an unmistakable , 
 
 aspect of winter in the sky and upon the fields; the 
 little land-locked harbor looked bleak and desolate, 
 and the wide expanse of water beyond was dark, cold 
 and threatening. I found my study cheerless and 
 unfamiliar; it was deserted by one season, and the 
 next had not yet taken possession of it. It was a 
 
2 MY STUDY FIRE. 
 
 barren day; thought and feeling were both con- 
 gealed, and refused to flow, and even my faithful 
 pen, that has patiently traversed so many sheets of 
 blank paper, stumbled and halted. After a fruit- 
 less struggle with myself and my environment, I 
 yielded to the general depression and closed my 
 portfolio. A long walk brought me into harmony 
 with nature, and when I returned I was not sorry 
 to see that the andirons had been heaped with wood 
 in my absence, and all things made ready for light- 
 ing the fire. 
 
 We lingered long at the dinner-table that even- 
 ing, and when we left it a common impulse seemed 
 to lead us into the study. Rosalind always lights 
 the fire, and one of the pleasant impressions of the 
 annual ceremonial is the glow of the first blaze upon 
 her fair face and waving hair. Two little heads 
 mingled their wealth of golden tresses at one end of 
 the rug, intent upon the quick, mysterious contagion 
 of flame which never fails to fill them with wonder; 
 while in the background I watched the picture, so 
 soon to take on a new and subtle beauty, with curi- 
 ously mixed regret and anticipation. I take out my 
 watch in unconscious recognition of the importance 
 of an event which marks the autumnal equinox in the 
 household calendar. At the same moment a little 
 puff of smoke announces that the momentous act 
 has been performed ; all eyes are fixed on the fire- 
 place, and every swift advance of flame, creeping 
 silently from stick to stick until the whole mass is 
 
THE FIRE LIGHTED. 3 
 
 wrapped in fire, is noted with deepening satisfaction. 
 A genial warmth begins to pervade the room, and 
 the soft glow falls first on the little group, and then 
 passes on to touch the pictures and the rows of 
 books with its luminous and transfiguring cheer. I 
 am suddenly conscious that a new spirit has taken 
 possession of the room, liberated no doubt by the 
 curling flames that are now singing among the sticks, 
 and hinting that it is winter, after all, which forces 
 from summer her last and rarest charm, her deepest 
 and most spiritual truth. That which has vanished 
 to the eye lives in the thought, and takes on its 
 most elusive and yet its most abiding beauty. 
 
 This first lighting of the fire in my study is, 
 indeed, a brief transfigurationof life; it discloses to 
 me anew the very soul of nature, it reveals the 
 thought that runs through literature, it discovers 
 the heart of my hope and aspiration. I catch in this 
 transient splendor a vision of the deepest meaning 
 which life and art have for me. The glow rests first 
 upon those faces, eagerly searching the depths of 
 the fire, that are the very heart of my heart ; it rests 
 next upon the books in which the thoughts of the 
 great teachers and the dreams of the great artists 
 remain indestructible; it steals last through the win- 
 dows, and, even in the night, seems to bathe the far- 
 reaching landscape in a passing glory. Like the 
 spirit which Faust summoned into his study, it 
 
 reveals to me 
 
 " A weaving, flowing 
 Life, all glowing." 
 
4 MY ST&DY FIRE. 
 
 After a time the golden heads begin to nod, and the 
 dreams which they have seen in the glowing coals and 
 the dancing flames begin to mingle with the dreams 
 which sleep weaves with such careless, audacious 
 fingers over the unconscious hours. The good-nights 
 are soon said, and the little feet, already overtaken 
 with drowsiness, make uncertain sounds on the 
 stairs as they take up their journey to slumberland. 
 Rosalind returns in a moment, and draws her easy- 
 chair before the fire, with some fragile apology for 
 occupation in her hands. The lamp has not been 
 lighted, and neither of us seems to note the absence 
 of its friendly flame. The book. that we have been 
 reading aloud by turns lies unopened, and the stream 
 of talk that generally touches the events of the day 
 in little eddies and then flows on to deepei themes 
 is lost in a silence which neither is willing to break, 
 because it is so much -fuller of meaning than any 
 words could be. Like the ancient river of Elis, 
 thought flows on underground, and perhaps is all 
 the deeper and sweeter because it does not flash 
 into speech. 
 
 For a long time I do nothing but dream, and 
 dreams are by no means unprofitable to those whose 
 waking hours are given to honest work ; dreams are 
 not without meaning, for they are combined of 
 memory and prophecy so subtly that no chemistry 
 of philosophy has yet been able to separate them 
 into their component parts. In his dreams a 
 thoughtful man sees both his past and his future 
 
THE FIRE RIGHTED. 5 
 
 pass before him in the order of their real sequence ; 
 there are the memories, not so much of his acts as 
 of the purposes that were behind them, and there 
 are the aspirations and hopes with which he uncon- 
 sciously fills the years to come. A bad man cannot 
 face an open fire with comfort, and he must be a 
 man of rare fidelity of purpose and achievement to 
 whom its searching light does not bring some revela- 
 tions of himself which he would rather have hidden 
 under the ashes of the past. 
 
 While I was meditating on the moral uses of a 
 fire on the hearth, Rosalind put on a fresh stick, 
 and stirred the half-burned wood with an energy 
 that raised a little shower of sparks. The tongues 
 of flame began to circle about the hickory, eager, 
 apparently, to find the responsive glow sleeping in 
 its sound and reticent heart. I recalled the strip of 
 woodland from which it was cut, and like a vision 
 I saw once more the summer skies and heard the 
 summer birds. The seasons are so linked together 
 in the procession of the year that they are never out 
 of sight of each other. Even now, as I step to the \ 
 window, and look upon the bleak landscape under 
 the cold light of the wintry stars, I see just beyond 
 the retreating splendor of autumn ; I hear at inter- 
 vals the choirs of summer chanting to the sun their 
 endless-adoration ; and from the front of the column, 
 almost lost to sight, come whiffs of that delicate 
 fragrance which escaped when spring broke the ala- 
 baster box and poured out the treasures of the year. 
 
6 MY STUDY FIRE. 
 
 AEach season has lavished its wealth on me, and 
 lleach has awakened its kindred moods and stirred 
 lilts kindred thoughts within me. I am conscious, as 
 I look into the bed of glowing coals to which the 
 fire has sunk, that I am even now undergoing the 
 subtle process of change from season to season. 
 The habits, the moods, the impressions, which sum- 
 mer created in me have gone, and- new aptitudes, 
 thoughts, and emotions have taken their place. 
 The world through which I have wandered with 
 vagrant feet these past months, intent only to keep 
 a heart open to every voice from field and wood and 
 sky, has sunk below the horizon, and another and 
 different world has risen into view. Pan pipes no 
 more, while Orion blazes overhead and leads the 
 glittering constellations. Thought, that has played 
 truant through the long days, forgetting books and 
 men in its chase after beauty and its stealthy ambus- 
 cade of the hermit-thrush in the forest, returns 
 once more to brood over the problems of its own 
 / being, and to search for the truth that lies at the 
 bottom of the wells that men have dug along the 
 route of history for the refreshment of the race. 
 
 The glow of the dying fire no longer reaches the 
 windows ; the world beyond is left undisturbed to 
 night and darkness ; but it still sends flickering 
 gleams along the rows of books, and lights up their 
 dusky titles. These are the true companions of the 
 short wintry days and the long wintry nights. To 
 find the life that is in them, to read with clear eyes 
 
THE FIRE LIGHTED. 7 
 
 whatever of truth they contain, to see face to face 
 the deep human experiences out of which they 
 grew — these are the tasks to which the season leads 
 us. In summer the senses wander abroad, and 
 thought keeps company with them, hand in hand 
 with nature, eager to see, to hear, and to feel ; in 
 winter the wanderers return to the fire, to recall and 
 meditate upon the scenes in which they have mingled, 
 and of which they themselves have been a part. 
 
 Rosalind gives the fire another stirring, and the 
 last latent flame flashes up and falls upon that 
 ancient handbook of life and toil, Hesiod's "Works 
 and Days." How happily the old Greek ensnared 
 the year, with all its hours and tasks, in that well- 
 worn title! We, too, shall share with him the toils 
 and pleasures of the seasons. We have had our 
 Days ; our Works await us. 
 
CHAPTER II. 
 
 NATURE AND CHILDHOOD. 
 
 Is it not due to November that some discreet per- 
 son should revise what the poets have said about it? 
 For one, I have felt no slight sense of shame as I 
 opened to the melancholy lines full of the wail of 
 winds and the sob of rain, while a brilliant autumnal 
 light has flooded the world. The days have passed 
 in a stately procession, under skies so cloudless and 
 serene and with such amplitude of golden light that 
 I have sometimes thought I saw a little disdain of 
 the accessories of the earlier season. It has seemed 
 as if November, radiant and sunlit, needed no soft, 
 fleecy clouds, no budding flowers, no rich and rust- 
 ling foliage, to complete her charm. Even the 
 splendid tradition of October has not overawed its 
 maligned successor, and of the oft-repeated slan- 
 ders of the poets no notice has been taken save per- 
 haps to cast a more brilliant light upon their graves. 
 It is certainly high time that the traditional Novem- 
 ber should give place to the actual November — 
 month of prolonged and golden light, with just 
 enough of cloud and shadow to heighten by con- 
 trast the brilliancy of the sunshine. The border- 
 land between winter and summer is certainly the 
 
NATURE AND CHILDHOOD. 9 
 
 most beautiful and alluring part of the year. The 
 late spring and the late autumn months hold in equi- 
 poise the charms of both seasons. Their character- 
 istics are less pronounced and more subtle; and 
 they are for that reason richer in suggestiveness and 
 more alluring to the imagination. 
 
 I have watched the flight of the autumnal days 
 from my study windows as one watches the distant 
 passage of the birds southward. They have carried 
 the last memories of summer with them, but with 
 what grace and majesty they have retreated before 
 an invisible foe! With slow and noiseless step, 
 pausing for days together in soft, unbroken dreams, 
 they have passed beyond the horizon line and left 
 me under a spell so deep that I have hardly yet 
 shaken it off and turned to other sights and thoughts. 
 One of the great concerns of life is this silent, un- 
 broken procession of the seasons, rising from the 
 deeps of time like dreams sent to touch our mortal 
 life with more than mortal beauty. Stars, tides, 
 flowers, foliage, birds, clouds, snows, and storms — ■ 
 how marvelous is the -frame in which they appear 
 and disappear about us ; as real as ourselves, and 
 yet as fleeting and elusive as our dreams ! 
 
 Rosalind and I have often talked about these 
 things as they appear to children, and we are agreed 
 that nature is a good deal nearer and more intelligi- 
 ble to childhood than most people think. Children 
 of sensitive and imaginative temper have marvelous 
 capacity for receiving impressions : they absorb as 
 
io MY STUDY FIRE. 
 
 unconsciously to themselves as to others. When 
 they seem most indifferent or preoccupied they are 
 often most impressionable. Unperceived by those 
 who are nearest them, unrecognized at the moment 
 by themselves, there often press upon the mind of 
 a child the deepest and most awful mysteries of life; 
 mysteries that lie far beyond the plummet of thought. 
 It is only as one thinks back and recalls out of 
 memory those marvelous moments when every visi- 
 ble thing seemed suddenly smitten with unreality in 
 the presence of some great spiritual truth, felt but 
 uncomprehended, that one realizes the depth and 
 richness of the unspoken thoughts of children. In 
 a passage of great beauty De Quincey has described 
 the feelings that came when as a boy he stood be- 
 side the form of his dead sister. "There lay the 
 sweet childish figure; there the angel face: and, as 
 people usually fancy, it was said in the house that 
 not one feature had suffered any change. Had 
 they not? The forehead, indeed — the serene and 
 noble forehead — that might be the same; but the 
 frozen eyelids, the darkness that seemed to steal 
 from beneath them, the marble lips, the stiffening 
 hands, laid palm to palm, as if repeating the suppli- 
 cations of closing anguish — could these be mistaken 
 for life? Had it been so, wherefore did I not 
 spring to those heavenly lips with tears and never 
 ending kisses? But so it was not. I stood checked 
 for a moment ; awe, not fear, fell upon me ; and 
 whilst I stood, a solemn wind began to blow — the 
 
NATURE AND CHILDHOOD. 1 1 
 
 saddest that ear ever heard. It was a wind that 
 might have swept the fields of mortality for a thou- 
 sand centuries. Many times since, upon summer 
 days, when the sun is about the hottest, I have re- 
 marked the same wind arising and uttering the same 
 hollow, solemn Memnonian but saintly swell; it is 
 in this world the one great audible symbol of eter- 
 nity." That wind, more real than any that ever 
 blew over earthly fields, was heard by no one but 
 the imaginative child standing, to all appearance, 
 silent and spellbound beside his sister's form. 
 
 Not long ago Rosalind was looking through 
 Goethe's "Autobiography" to recall what the Ger- 
 man boy of six years thought of the terrible earth- 
 quake at Lisbon in 1755, when she happened upon 
 another very interesting and significant passage in 
 child life. The boy Goethe had heard much of the 
 discussion about religious matters which was warm 
 in those days, and invaded even the quiet and some- 
 what dry atmosphere of his father's house. He 
 gave no sign, but these things sank into his heart, 
 and finally there came to him the great thought that 
 he too might personally approach the invisible God 
 of nature. "The God who stands in immediate 
 connection with nature, and owns and loves it as 
 his work, seemed to him the proper God, who might 
 be brought into closer relationship with man, as 
 with everything else, and who would take care of 
 him as of the motion of the stars, the days and sea- 
 sons, the animals and plants. The boy could as- 
 
12 MY STUDY FIRE. 
 
 cribe no form to this Being; he therefore sought 
 him in his works, and would, in the good Old Testa- 
 ment fashion, build him an altar. ' ' To accomplish 
 this deep and secret purpose he took a lacquered 
 music-stand and ornamented it according to his own 
 idea of symbolism. This done, and the fumigating 
 pastils arranged, the young priest awaited the rising 
 of the sun. When the red light lay bright along the 
 edges of the roofs, he held a burning-glass above 
 the pastils, ignited them, and so obtained both the 
 flame and the fragrance necessary to his worship. 
 Does not this strange, secret act in a child's life 
 parallel and explain some of the earliest experiences 
 of the most primitive races? 
 
 A beautiful and prophetic story is told of William 
 Henry Channing by his latest biographer. He was 
 a singularly noble boy; graceful in figure, charming 
 in manner, expressive in countenance, sensitive, 
 responsive, and imaginative. One night after he 
 had fallen asleep he was suddenly awakened by a 
 noise, and, looking out of the window, he saw a 
 splendid star shining full upon him. "It fascinated 
 my gaze," he writes, "till it became like an angel's 
 eye. It seemed to burn in and penetrate to my in- 
 most being. My little heart beat fast and faster, 
 till I could bear the intolerable blaze no more. 
 And, hearing the steps of some servant in the pass- 
 age, I sprang from my crib, ran swiftly to the door, 
 and, in my long nightgown, with bare, noiseless feet, 
 followed down the stairway to the lower hall. . . . 
 
NATURE AND CHILDHOOD. 13 
 
 The footman flung open the drawing-room door, 
 and a flood of light, with a peal of laughter, burst 
 forth, and in the midst some voice cried out, 'What 
 is that in white behind you?' The servant had, 
 affrighted, turned and drawn aside. Instantly from 
 the brilliant circle stepped forth my mother, and, 
 folding me in her bosom, said, soothingly, 'What 
 troubles my boy?' All I could do was to fling my 
 arms about her neck and whisper, 'Oh mamma! 
 The star! the star! I could not bear the star!' " 
 There is a famous description of a kindred ex- 
 perience in one of those poems of Wordsworth's 
 which have become part of the memory of all lovers 
 of nature. It was the first poem I ever heard Emer- 
 son read, and the strange, penetrating sweetness of 
 that voice, so spiritual in its tone, so full of inter- 
 pretation in its accent, is for me part of the verse 
 itself: 
 
 " There was a Boy ; ye knew him well, ye cliffs 
 And islands of Winander! — many a time 
 At evening, when the earliest stars began 
 To move along the edges of the hills, 
 Rising or setting, would he stand alone, 
 Beneath the trees or by the glimmering lake ; 
 And there, with fingers interwoven, both hands 
 Pressed closely palm to palm and to his mouth 
 Uplifted, he, as through an instrument, 
 Blew mimic hootings to the silent owls. 
 That they might answer him ; And they would shout 
 Across the watery vale, and shout again, 
 Responsive to his call, with quivering peals, 
 And long halloos, and screams, and echoes loud, 
 
14 MY STUDY FIRE. 
 
 Redoubled and redoubled ; concourse wild 
 
 Of mirth and jocund din! And, when it chanced 
 
 That pauses of deep silence mocked his skill, 
 
 Then, sometimes, in that silence, while he hung 
 
 Listening, a gentle shock of mild surprise 
 
 Has carried far into his heart the voice 
 
 Of mountain torrents; or the visible scene 
 
 Would enter unawares into his mind 
 
 With all its solemn imagery, its rocks, 
 
 Its woods, and that uncertain heaven received 
 
 Into the bosom of the steady lake." 
 
 The wonderful experience, described in these 
 lines with the inimitable simplicity of nature itself, 
 marks an epoch in a child's life ; it is as if a door 
 were suddenly left ajar into some world unseen be- 
 fore. "Never shall I forget that inward occurrence, 
 till now narrated to no mortal," says Richter, 
 "wherein I witnessed the birth of my self-conscious- 
 ness, of which I can still give the time and place. 
 One forenoon I was standing, a very young child, 
 in the outer door, and looking leftward at the stack 
 of the fuel-wood, when all at once the internal vis- 
 ion, 'I am a me' {Ich bin ein Ich), came like a flash 
 from heaven before me, and in gleaming light ever 
 afterward continued. ' ' The incommunicable world 
 of childhood, through which we have all walked, 
 but which lies hidden from us now by a golden 
 mist — was it not the poetic prelude of life, wherein 
 the deepest things were seen at times in clear vision, 
 and the sublimest mysteries appealed to us with a 
 strange familiarity ! To imaginative childhood, is 
 
NATURE AND CHILDHOOD. 15 
 
 not the cycle of the changing seasons what it was 
 to the German boy in the narrow and straitened 
 country parsonage, an idyl-year? And is there not 
 for every child of kindred soul "an idyl-kingdom 
 and pastoral world in a little hamlet and par- 
 sonage?" 
 
CHAPTER III. 
 
 THE ANSWER OF LIFE. 
 
 The short December afternoon was already fad- 
 ing in a clear white light on the low hills, and the 
 shadows were creeping stealthily from point to point, 
 alert to seize every advantage and follow the retreat- 
 ing steps of day without break or pause. It was 
 that most delightful of all hours, when work is done 
 and the active enjoyment or companionship of the 
 evening has not begun. Rosalind had come in from 
 a long walk with a charming air of vigor and vital- 
 ity, which seemed to impart itself to the whole room. 
 She gave the fire an energetic stirring, which brought 
 its glow to a focus and kindled its latent flame into 
 a sudden and fiery splendor. Then she drew up a 
 low ottoman, and sat down to enjoy the cheer and 
 warmth which she had evoked. It was not the first 
 time that something which had smoldered in my 
 hands had caught life and beauty in hers. I was in 
 a somber mood. I had spent the morning, and, for 
 that matter, a good many mornings, re-reading the 
 Greek plays, and striving by a patient and persis- 
 tent use of the imagination to possess myself of the 
 secret of those masterly and immortal creations. 
 To me they had long ceased to be dead, and to-day 
 16 
 
THE ANSWER OF LIFE. 17 
 
 especially they were more vital and palpable than 
 anything that I saw in the world around me. I had 
 finished again that splendid trilogy in which ^Eschy- 
 lus unfolds the doom of the house of Atreus. I had 
 seen the flashing fires which lighted Agamemnon 
 home to his death; I had heard Cassandra's awful 
 monody ; I had heard, too, that appalling cry which 
 seemed to run through the world like the shudder 
 of a doomed soul when the great leader fell in his 
 own palace; I had witnessed the vengeance of the 
 offended gods through the hands of Orestes ; and I 
 had followed the Fury-haunted steps of the unwill- 
 ing executioner of the eternal law from the temple 
 at Delphi to the judgment seat at Athens. All these 
 things were still in my memory, and the room had 
 caught a solemn and awful quietude in the over- 
 shadowing presence of these vast and terrible repre- 
 sentations of antique life. 
 
 Rosalind's coming broke the spell of memories 
 that pressed too heavily on heart and mind ; she 
 seemed to reunite me with the movement of present 
 life, and to lead me out of the subterranean depths 
 where the springs of the great drama of history are 
 concealed, to the sunlight and bloom of the upper 
 world. In her I suddenly found the key to the 
 mystery which I had sought in vain to solve by 
 process of thought, for in her I saw the harmony of 
 law with beauty and joy, the rounded circle of right 
 action, and a temperament akin with light and song 
 and the sweetness of nature. 
 
1 8 MY STUDY FIRE. 
 
 "You are thinking," she said at last, as she turned 
 toward me, as if to carry further a line of thought 
 which she seized by the mingled intuition of long 
 affection and intimate fellowship — "you are think- 
 ing that — " 
 
 "I was thinking that you are often a better answer 
 to my questions than I can ever hope to frame for 
 myself. I was thinking that the deepest mysteries 
 of life are explained, and the deepest problems of 
 life are solved, not by thinking but by living. When 
 I see a man who has broken a fundamental law, and 
 by patience, penitence, and labor has regained the 
 harmony which he lost, I no longer sorrow that 
 ^schylus's 'Prometheus Bound' is a fragment. I 
 see before me in actual realization the solution which 
 the dramatist undoubtedly presented in the two 
 plays of the Trilogy which are lost. Genius can do 
 much, but even genius falls short of the actuality 
 of a single human life. I have been among my books 
 all day, and they have confused and overpowered 
 me with doubts and questions which start in books 
 but are rarely answered there ; you have come in, 
 fresh, buoyant, and full of hope, from contact with 
 life, where these questions find their answers if we 
 are only willing to keep an open mind and heart." 
 
 "But don't you think," Rosalind interrupted, 
 "that the problems of living are more dramatically 
 and clearly stated in books than in the lives of the 
 men and women we know in this village?" 
 
 "Yes," I said, holding a newspaper before my 
 
THE ANSWER OE LIFE. 19 
 
 face to shield it from the glow of the ambitious fire ; 
 "yes, more dramatically stated, because all the irre- 
 levant details are omitted. There is the material for 
 a drama in the career of almost every person that 
 we know, but the movement is overlaid and con- 
 cealed by all kinds of trivial matter. A drama- 
 tist would seize the dramatic movement and bring 
 it into clear view by casting all this aside. He 
 would disentangle the thread from the confused 
 web into which every life runs to a casual observer. 
 The problems are more clearly stated in books than 
 in life, but they are not so clearly answered." 
 
 Here the children rushed in with some request, 
 which they whispered in solemn secrecy to their 
 common confidant, and then, receiving the answer 
 they hoped for, rushed out again. It was a detached 
 segment of life which they brought in and took out 
 of the study in such eager haste. I knew neither 
 the cause of the glow on their cheeks, nor of the 
 light in their eyes, nor of the deep mystery which 
 surrounded them as with an atmosphere. 
 
 "There is more to be learned from those children 
 concerning the mysteries of life," I said, after they 
 had gone, "than from any book which it has ever 
 been my fortune to happen upon. The mysteries 
 which perplex me are not so much in the appearance 
 of things, and in their definite relations, as in the 
 processes through which we are all passing. I have 
 always had a secret sympathy with those old 
 Oriental religions which deified the processes of 
 
20 MY STUDY FIRE. 
 
 nature — the births and deaths and growth of things. 
 The festivals which greeted the return of spring, 
 with overflowing life in its train, and the sad pro- 
 cessionals which lamented the departure of summer 
 and the incoming of death, had a large element of 
 reality in them. They appeal to me more than the 
 worship of the serene gods whose faces and forms 
 are so perfectly defined in art. 
 
 "I do not believe," I added, laying down the 
 newspaper and stirring the fire for the sake of the 
 glow on the deepening shadows in the room — "I do 
 not believe that the deeper problems of living ever 
 can be answered by the processes of thought. I 
 believe that life itself teaches us either patience 
 with regard to them, or reveals to us possible solu- 
 tions when our hearts are pressed close against duties 
 and sorrows and experiences of all kinds. I believe 
 that in the thought and feelings and sufferings of 
 children, for instance, an observer will often catch, 
 as in a flash of revelation, some fruitful suggestion 
 of his own relation to the universe, some far-reach- 
 ing analogy of the processes of his own growth. This 
 wisdom of experience, which often ripens even in un- 
 trained minds into a kind of clairvoyant vision, is the 
 deepest wisdom after all, and books are only valu- 
 able and enduring as they include and express it." 
 
 I was just about to illustrate by saying that for 
 this reason "The Imitation of Christ" has survived 
 all the great volumes of learning and philosophy of 
 its age, when the bell rang, and a visitor robbed me 
 of my audience. 
 
CHAPTER IV. 
 
 a poet's crown of sorrow. 
 
 Sitting here at my writing-table loaded with 
 magazines, reviews, and recent books, the fire burn- 
 ing cheerily on the hearth, Rosalind meditatively 
 plying her needle, and wind and rain without in- 
 creasing by contrast the inner warmth and bright- 
 ness, it is not easy to realize the pathos of life as 
 one reads it in poetry, nor to enter into its mystery 
 of suffering as it has pressed heavily upon some of 
 the greatest poets. The fountains of joy and sor- 
 row are for the most part locked up in ourselves, but 
 there are always those against whom, by some mys- 
 terious conjunction of the stars, calamity and dis- 
 aster are written in a lifelong sentence. It is the 
 lot of all superior natures to suffer as a part of their 
 training and as the price of their gifts ; but this 
 suffering has often no thorn of outward loss thrust 
 into its sensitive heart. There are those, however, 
 on whose careers shadows from within and from 
 without meet in a common darkness and complete 
 that slow anguish of soul by which a personal agony 
 is sometimes transmuted into a universal consola- 
 tion and strength. The anguish of the cross has 
 always been the prelude to the psalms of deliver- 
 
22 MY STUDY FIRE. 
 
 ance, and the world has made no new conquest of 
 truth and life except through those who have trod- 
 den the via dolorosa. 
 
 I am quite sure that these thoughts are in the 
 mind, or rather in the heart, of Rosalind, for she 
 drops her work at intervals and looks into the fire 
 with the intentness of gaze of one who sees some- 
 thing which she does not understand. I am not 
 blind to the vision which lies before her and fills 
 her with doubt and uncertainty. It is the little town 
 of Tous which the fire pictures before her, its white 
 roofs glistening in the light of the Persian summer 
 day. But it is not the beauty of the Oriental city 
 which holds her gaze, it is the funeral train of a 
 dead poet passing through the western gate while 
 the reward of his immortal work, long withheld by 
 an ignoble king, is borne into the deserted streets 
 by the slow-moving camels. Surely the irony of 
 what men call destiny was never more strikingly 
 illustrated than in the story of Firdousi, the great 
 epic poet who sang for Persia as Homer sang for 
 Greece. Rosalind, who always wants to know a 
 man of genius on the side of his misfortunes or his 
 heart history, began the evening by reading aloud 
 Mr. Gosse's picturesque "Firdousi in Exile," a 
 poem of pleasant descriptive quality, but lacking 
 that undertone of pathos which the story ought to 
 have carried with itself. Such a story puts one in 
 a silent mood, and in the lull of conversation I have 
 read to myself Mr. Arnold's fine rendering of the 
 
A POET'S CRO WN OF SORKO W. 23 
 
 famous episode of "Sohrab and Rustem" from the 
 "Epic of Kings"; a noble piece of English blank 
 verse, from which I cannot forbear quoting a well- 
 known passage, so full of deep, quiet beauty is it : 
 
 " But the majestic river floated on, 
 Out of the mist and hum of that low land, 
 Into the frosty starlight, and there moved, 
 Rejoicing, through the hush'd Chorasmian waste, 
 Under the solitary moon ; he flow'd 
 Right for the polar star, past Orgunje, 
 Brimming, and bright, and large; then sands begin 
 To hem his watery march, and dam his streams, 
 And split his currents ; that for many a league 
 The shorn and parcell'd Oxus strains along 
 Through beds of sand and matted rushy isles — 
 Oxus, forgetting the bright speed he had 
 In his high mountain cradle in Pamere, 
 A foil'd circuitous wanderer — till at last 
 The long'd-for dash of waves is heard, and wide 
 His luminous home of waters opens, bright 
 And tranquil, from whose floor the new-bathed stars 
 Emerge, and shine upon the Aral Sea." 
 
 Not unlike the movement of the Oxus was the 
 life of the poet whose song has touched it with a 
 beauty not its own ; a life fretted by jealousies, 
 broken by stupid treachery, but sweeping onward, 
 true to its star, and finding peace at last in that 
 fathomless sea to which all life is tributary. The 
 pathos of such life lies not so much in individual 
 suffering as in the contrast between the service ren- 
 dered and the recognition accorded to it. The 
 poet had immortalized his country and his master, 
 
24 MY STUDY FIRE. 
 
 and his reward after thirty years of toil was a long 
 exile. 
 
 " In vain through sixty thousand verses clear 
 
 He sang of feuds and battles, friend and foe, 
 Of the frail heart of Kaous, spent with fear, 
 
 And Kal Khosrau who vanished in the snow, 
 And white-haired Zal who won the secret love 
 
 Of Rudabeh where water-lilies blow, 
 And lordliest Rustem, armed by gods above 
 
 With every power and virtue mortals known." 
 
 For this inestimable service of holding aloft over 
 Persian history the torch of the imagination until 
 it lay clear and luminous in the sight of the centu- 
 ries, Firdousi was condemned to learn the bitter- 
 ness of wide and restless wanderings. Many a Tar- 
 tar camp knew him; Herat, the mountains about 
 the Caspian, Astrabad, the Tigris, and Bagdad saw 
 the white-haired poet pass, or accorded him a brief 
 and broken rest from journeying. There is an 
 atmosphere of poetry about these ancient names, 
 but no association is likely to linger longer in the 
 memory of men than the fact that they were sta- 
 tions in Firdousi's exile. It is one of the uncon- 
 scious gifts of genius that it bestows immortality 
 upon all who come into relation with it. But the 
 crowning touch of pathos came at the close, when 
 the long withheld treasure entered the gates of Tous 
 as the body of the poet was borne out of the city to 
 its last repose. The repentance of Mahmoud had 
 come too late ; he had blindly thrust aside the rich- 
 
A POET'S CROWN OF SORROW. 25 
 
 est crown of good fame ever offered to a Persian 
 king. 
 
 But there are sadder stories than that of Firdousi; 
 one story, notably, which all men recall instinctively 
 when they speak of exile. The Persian poet had 
 written the "Epic of Kings" in a palace, and with 
 the resources of a king at command, but Dante was 
 a homeless wanderer in the years which saw the 
 birth of the Divine Comedy. To that great song 
 in which the heart of Mediaevalism was to live for- 
 ever, Florence contributed nothing but the anguish 
 of soul through which the mind slowly finds its way 
 to the highest truth. A noble nature, full of deep 
 convictions, fervent loves, with the sensitiveness 
 and prophetic sight of genius, cut off from all natural 
 channels of growth, activity, and ambition, con- 
 demned to 
 
 ". . . . prove how salt a savor hath 
 The bread of others, and how hard a path 
 To climb and to descend the stranger's stairs." 
 
 Surely no great man ever ate his bread wet with 
 tears of deeper bitterness than Dante. One has 
 but to recall his stern love of truth and his intense 
 sensitiveness to injustice, to imagine in some degree 
 what fathomless depths of suffering lay hidden 
 from the eyes of men under that calm, majestic 
 composure of manner and speech. The familiar 
 story of his encounter with the Florentine black- 
 smith comes to mind as indicating how his proud 
 spirit resented the slightest injustice. One morn- 
 
26 MY STUDY FIRE. 
 
 ing, as the blacksmith was singing snatches from 
 the song of the new poet, Dante passed by, listened 
 a moment, and then, in a sudden passion, strode 
 into the shop and began throwing the implements 
 which the smith had about him into the street. 
 
 "What are you doing? Are you mad?" cried the 
 blacksmith, so overcome with astonishment that he 
 made no effort to protect his property. 
 
 "And what are you doing?" replied the poet, 
 fast emptying the shop of its tools. 
 
 "I am working at my proper business, and you 
 are spoiling my work. ' ' 
 
 "If you do not wish me to spoil your things, do 
 not spoil mine." 
 
 "What thing of yours am I spoiling?" 
 
 "You are singing something of mine, but not as 
 I wrote it. I have no other trade but this, and you 
 spoil it for me." 
 
 The poet departed as abruptly as he came. He 
 had satisfied the sense of injustice done him by swift 
 punishment ; and it does not surprise us to be told 
 by Sacchetti that the blacksmith, having collected 
 his scattered tools and returned to his work, hence- 
 forth sang other songs. This simple incident dis- 
 closes that sensitiveness to injustice which made the 
 banishment of Dante one long torture of soul. 
 They utterly mistake the nature of greatness who 
 imagine that the bitterest sorrow of such experiences 
 as those of Firdousi and Dante lies in loss of those 
 things which most men value; the sharpest thorn 
 
A POET'S CROWN OF SORROW. 27 
 
 in such crowns is the sense of ingratitude and injus- 
 tice, the consciousness of the possession of great 
 gifts rejected and cast aside. There is nothing 
 more tragic in all the range of life than the fate of 
 those who, like Jeremiah, Cassandra, and Tiresias, 
 are condemned to see the truth, to speak it, and to 
 be rebuked and rejected by the men about them. 
 Could anything be more agonizing than to see clearly 
 an approaching danger, to point it out, and be 
 thrust aside with laughter or curses, and then to 
 watch, helpless and solitary, the awful and implaca- 
 ble approach of doom? In some degree this lot is 
 shared by every poet, and to the end of time every 
 poet will find such a sorrow a part of his birthright. 
 
 "After all," said Rosalind, suddenly breaking 
 the silence of thought that has evidently traveled 
 along the same path as my own — "after all, I'm not 
 sure that they are to be pitied." 
 
 "Pity is the last word I should think of in con- 
 nection with them; it is only a confusion of ideas 
 which makes us even feel like pitying them. The 
 real business of life, as Carlyle tried so hard to 
 make us believe, is to find the truth and to live by 
 it. If, in the doing of this, what men call happi- 
 ness falls to our lot, well and good; but it must be 
 as an incident, not as an end. There come to great, 
 solitary, and sorely smitten souls moments of clear 
 sight, of assurance of victory, of unspeakable fel- 
 lowship with truth and life and God, which out- 
 weigh years of sorrow and bitterness. Firdousi 
 
28 MY STUDY FIRE. 
 
 knew that he had left Persia a priceless possession, 
 and the Purgatorio of Dante w.as not too much to 
 pay for the Paradiso." 
 
 "And yet," said Rosalind slowly, looking into 
 the fire, and thinking, perhaps, of the children 
 asleep with happy dreams, and all the sweet peace 
 of the home — "and yet how much they lose!" 
 
CHAPTER V. 
 
 THE FAILINGS OF GENIUS. 
 
 The study fire burns for the most part in a quiet, 
 meditative way that fails in with the thought and 
 the talk that are inspired by it. Occasionally, how- 
 ever, it crackles and snaps in an argumentative mood 
 that makes one wonder what sort of communication 
 it is trying to have with the world around it. Is it 
 the indignant protest of some dismembered tree 
 ruthlessly cut down in the morning of life, that ener- 
 getically but ineffectually sputters itself forth in the 
 glowing heat ? Perhaps if Gilbert White, or Thoreau, 
 or Burroughs happened to fill my easy-chair at such 
 a moment, this question might be answered; I, in 
 my ignorance, can only ask it. Of one thing I am 
 certain, however: that^when the fire falls into this 
 humor it is quite likely to take Rosalind and myself 
 with it; on such occasions the quiet talk or the long, 
 uninterrupted reading gives place to a discussion 
 which is likely to be prolonged until the back-log 
 falls in two and the ashes lie white and powdering 
 around the expiring embers. Even then the pretty 
 bellows which came several Christmases ago from 
 one whose charm makes it impossible to use the 
 word common even to describe her friendship for 
 29 
 
3° MY STUDY FIRE. 
 
 Rosalind and myself, are vigorously used to give 
 both fire and talk a few minutes' grace. 
 
 It is generally concerning some fact or event 
 which disturbs Rosalind's idealization of life that 
 these discussions rise and flourish. This charming 
 woman persists, for instance, in declining to take 
 any account of traits and characteristics in eminent 
 men of letters which impair the symmetry of the 
 ideal literary life; with delightful feminine insistence, 
 she will have her literary man a picturesque ideal, 
 or else will not have him at all. For myself, on the 
 other hand, I am rather attracted than repelled by 
 the failings of great men ; in their human limita- 
 tions, their prejudices, their various deflections from 
 the line of perfect living, I find the ties that link 
 them to myself and to a humanity whose perfection 
 is not only a vague dream of the future, but actually 
 and for the deepest reasons impossible. The faults 
 of men of genius have been emphasized, misre- 
 presented, and exaggerated in a way that makes 
 most writing about such men of no value to those 
 who care for truth. The men are few in every age 
 who can honestly and intelligently enter into and 
 possess the life of a former time; the men who can 
 comprehend a human life that belongs to the past 
 are fewer still. The writers who have been most 
 active, radical, and influential are those whose secret 
 is most likely to escape the search of biographers and 
 critics. Most of what has been written about such 
 men, for instance, as Petrarch, Goethe, Voltaire, 
 
THE FAILINGS OF GENIUS. 3 1 
 
 Heine, Carlyle, may be wisely consigned to that 
 insatiable spirit of flame which devours falsehoods 
 and crude, worthless stuff with the same appetite 
 which it brings to the choicest books in the world. 
 Men of genius are as much amenable to law as 
 the meanest of their fellow-creatures, but the latter 
 are not always the best interpreters of that law. 
 English criticism owes Carlyle an immense debt for 
 destroying the superstition that every man of letters 
 must be brought to the bar of the Thirty-nine Arti- 
 cles; and criticism in this country is slow to learn 
 from such spirits as Emerson the true standards and 
 measures of greatness. For the most part, ignor- 
 ance and stupid unbelief have waylaid and attempted 
 to throttle those hardy spirits who have ventured to 
 set foot in the Temple of Fame. 
 
 Men of genius, as I often tell Rosalind, must always 
 stand a very poor chance with the conventional 
 people; the people, that is, who accept the tradi- 
 tional standards they find about them, and who live 
 on the surface of things. It is the constant ten- 
 dency of life, like the earth's crust, to cool off and 
 harden ; it is the common task of all men of origi- 
 nal power to reverse this course of things. A good 
 many men perform this duty in a needlessly offen- 
 sive manner; they lack the sound sense of Richter, 
 who, when he found that his habit of omitting the 
 omnipresent collar from his toilet set all tongues 
 a-wagging, wisely concluded to conform to fashion 
 in a trivial matter, in order that he might put his 
 
32 MY STUDY FIRE. 
 
 whole strength into a struggle on vital principles. 
 And yet there is no reason why a great man should 
 not indulge in his little idiosyncrasy if he chooses 
 to; surely intelligent men and women ought to be 
 about better business than commenting on the length 
 of Tennyson's hair or the roll of Whitman's coat. 
 In a world in which so many people wear the same 
 clothes, live in the same house, eat the same dinner, 
 and say the same things, blessed are the individ- 
 ualities who are not lost in the mob, who have their 
 own thoughts and live their own lives. The case 
 of the man of genius can be put in a paragraph : 
 the conventional people control society; they can 
 never understand him; hence the cloud of miscon- 
 ception and misrepresentation in which he lives and 
 dies. To a man of sensitive temperament this pro- 
 cess is often intensely painful; to a man of virile 
 temper it is often full of humorous suggestion. 
 Gifted men take a certain satirical satisfaction in 
 bringing into clear light the innocent ignorance of 
 those whose every word of criticism or laudation 
 betrayed a complete misconception. The charming 
 old story of Sophocles's defense of himself by simply 
 reading to the Athenian jury the exquisite choral 
 ode on Colonos would sound apocryphal if told of a 
 modern jury. The case of Carlyle furnishes a good 
 illustration; among all the mass of writing relating 
 to this man of genius that has been poured upon a 
 defenseless world, it is safe to say that one can 
 count on the finders of one hand the articles that 
 
THE FAILINGS OF GENIUS. 33 
 
 have betrayed any real understanding of the man. 
 One readily understands, in the light of this and 
 similar past records, the fervor with which Sir Henry 
 Taylor reports Tennyson as saying that he thanked 
 God with his whole heart and soul that he knew 
 nothing, and that the world knew nothing, of Shake- 
 speare but his writings ! In these days a man of 
 letters takes his life in his hand when he takes up his 
 pen; the curse of publicity which attaches itself not 
 only to his work but to himself is as comprehensive 
 as an Arab imprecation; it covers his ancestry and 
 his posterity with impartial malediction. When 
 such a dust from rude and curious feet has half 
 suffocated one all his life, he must be ready to say 
 with the Laureate: 
 
 " Come not, when I am dead, 
 
 To drop thy foolish tears upon my grave, 
 To trample round my fallen head, 
 
 And vex the unhappy dust thou wouldst not save. 
 There let the wind sweep and the plover cry ; 
 But thou, go by. 
 
 "Child, if it were thine error or thy crime 
 I care no longer, being all unblest ; 
 Wed whom thou wilt, but I am sick of Time, 
 
 And I desire to rest. 
 Pass on, weak heart, and leave me where I lie — 
 Go by, go by." 
 
 There is a respect, a deference, a deep and vital 
 affection, in which the true man of letters finds one 
 of his sweetest and purest rewards; the mind and 
 heart which hospitably receive his truest thought 
 3 
 
34 MY STUDY FIRE. 
 
 and honor him for it must always command an 
 answering glow of gratitude. It is the vulgar love 
 of novelty, publicity, mere cleverness, from which 
 the man of genius shrinks. Perhaps the bitterest 
 experience in the life of the Teacher of Galilee 
 was the eagerness with which the crowds looked for 
 miracles, the apathy with which they listened to 
 truth. Through the noise and roar of the shallow 
 current of popular applause there runs for every 
 genuine man of letters a deep, quiet current of 
 intelligent sympathy and love which fertilizes his 
 life wherever it comes in contact with it. Of this 
 true and honest homage to what is best and noblest 
 in one's work, Sir Henry Taylor gives an illustra- 
 tion : "I met in the train yesterday a meager, sickly, 
 peevish-looking, elderly man, not affecting to be 
 quite a gentleman. . . . and on showing him the 
 photographs of Lionel Tennyson which I carried in 
 my hand, he spoke of 'In Memoriam,' and said he 
 had made a sort of churchyard of it, and had appro- 
 priated some passage of it to each of his departed 
 friends, and that he read it every Sunday, and never 
 came to the bottom of the depths of it. More to 
 be prized this, I thought, than the criticism of 
 critics, however plauditory. " 
 
CHAPTER VI. 
 
 CHRISTMAS EVE. 
 
 The world has been full of mysteries to-day; 
 everybody has gone about weighted with secrets. 
 The children's faces have fairly shone with expec- 
 tancy, and I enter easily into the universal dream 
 which at this moment holds all the children of Chris- 
 tendom under its spell. Was there ever a wider or 
 more loving conspiracy than that which keeps the 
 venerable figure of Santa Claus from slipping away, 
 with all the other oldtime myths, into the forsaken 
 wonderland of the past? Of all the personages 
 whose marvelous doings once filled the minds of 
 men, he alone survives. He has outlived all the 
 great gods, and all the impressive and poetic con- 
 ceptions which once flitted between heaven and 
 earth ; these have gone, but Santa Claus remains by 
 virtue of a common understanding that childhood 
 shall not be despoiled of one of its most cherished 
 beliefs, either by the mythologist, with his sun myth 
 theory, or the scientist, with his heartless diatribe 
 against superstition. There is a good deal more 
 to be said on this subject, if this were the place to 
 say it ; even superstition has its uses, and sometimes, 
 its sound heart of truth. He who does not see in 
 35 
 
36 MY STUDY FIRE. 
 
 the legend of Santa Claus a beautiful faith on one 
 side, and the nai've embodiment of a divine fact on 
 the other, is not fit to have a place at the Christmas 
 board. For him there should be neither carol, nor 
 holly, nor mistletoe; they only shall keep the feast 
 to whom all these things are but the outward and 
 visible signs of an inward and spiritual grace. 
 
 Rosalind and myself are thoroughly orthodox 
 when it comes to the keeping of holidays ; here at 
 least the ways of our fathers are our ways also. 
 Orthodoxy generally consists in retaining and em- 
 phasizing the disagreeable ways of the fathers, and as 
 we are both inclined to heterodoxy on these points, 
 we make the more prominent our observance of the 
 best of the old time habits. I might preach a pleas- 
 ant little sermon just here, taking as my text the 
 "survival of the fittest," and illustrating the truth 
 from our own domestic ritual ; but the season 
 preaches its own sermon, and I should only follow 
 the example of some ministers and get between the 
 text and my congregation if I made the attempt. 
 For weeks we have all been looking forward to this 
 eventful evening, and the still more eventful mor- 
 row. There have been hurried and whispered con- 
 ferences hastily suspended at the sound of a familiar 
 step on the stair; packages of every imaginable 
 size and shape have been surreptitiously introduced 
 into the house, and have immediately disappeared 
 in all manner of out-of-the-way places; and for 
 several weeks past one room has been constantly 
 
CHRISTMAS EVE. 37 
 
 under lock and key, visited only when certain sharp- 
 sighted eyes were occupied in other directions. 
 Through all this scene of mystery Rosalind has 
 moved sedately and with sealed lips, the common 
 confidant of all the conspirators, and herself the 
 greatest conspirator of all. Blessed is the season 
 which engages the whole world in a conspiracy of 
 love! 
 
 After dinner, eaten, let it be confessed, with more 
 haste and less accompaniment of talk than usual, 
 the parlor doors were opened, and there stood the 
 Christmas tree in a glow of light, its wonderful 
 branches laden with all manner of strange fruits not 
 to be found in the botanies. The wild shouts, the 
 merry laughter, the cries of delight as one coveted 
 fruit after another dropped into long-expectant 
 arms still linger in my ears now that the little tapers 
 are burnt out, the boughs left bare, and the actors 
 in the perennial drama are fast asleep, with new 
 and strange bedfellows selected from the spoils of 
 the night. Cradled between a delightful memory 
 and a blissful anticipation, who does not envy them? 
 
 After this charming prelude is over, Rosalind 
 comes into the study, and studies for the fortieth 
 time the effect of the new design of decoration 
 which she has this year worked out, and which gives 
 these rather somber rows of books a homelike and 
 festive aspect. It pleases me to note the spray of 
 holly that obscures the title of Bacon's solemn and 
 weighty "Essays," and I get half a page of sugges- 
 
38 MY STUDY FIRE. 
 
 tions for my notebook from the fact that a sprig of 
 mistletoe has fallen on old Burton's "Anatomy of 
 Melancholy." Rosalind has reason to be satisfied, 
 and if I read her face aright she has succeeded 
 even in her own eyes in bringing Christmas, with its 
 fragrant memories and its heavenly visions, into the 
 study. I cannot help thinking, as I watch her piling 
 up the fire for a blaze of unusual splendor, that if 
 more studies had their Rosalinds to bring in the 
 genial currents of life there would be more cheer 
 and hope and large-hearted wisdom in the books 
 which the world is reading to-day. 
 
 When the fire has reached a degree of intensity 
 and magnitude which Rosalind thinks adequate to 
 the occasion, I take down a well-worn volume which 
 opens of itself at a well-worn page. It is a book 
 which I have read and re-read many times, and 
 always with a kindling sympathy and affection for 
 the man who wrote it ; in whatever mood I take it 
 up there is something in it which touches me with 
 a sense of kinship. It is not a great book, but it is 
 a book of the heart, and books of the heart have 
 passed beyond the outer court of criticism before 
 we bestow upon them that phrase of supreme re- 
 gard. There are other books of the heart around 
 me, but on Christmas Eve it is Alexander Smith's 
 " Dreamthorp" which always seems to lie at my 
 hand, and when I take it up the well-worn volume 
 falls open at the essay on "Christmas." It is a 
 good many years since Rosalind and I began to 
 
CHRISTMAS EVE. 39 
 
 read together on Christmas Eve this beautiful medi- 
 tation on the season, and now it has gathered about 
 itself such a host of memories that it has become 
 part of our common past. It is, indeed, a veritable 
 palimpsest, overlaid with tender and gracious recol- 
 lections out of which the original thought gains a 
 new and subtle sweetness. As I read it aloud I 
 know that she sees once more the familiar land- 
 scape about Dreamthorp, with the low, dark hill in 
 the background, and over it "the tender radiance 
 that precedes the moon" ; the village windows are 
 all lighted, and the "whole place shines like a con- 
 gregation of glowworms." There are the skaters 
 still "leaning against the frosty wind" ; there is the 
 "gray church tower amid the leafless elms," around 
 which the echoes of the morning peal of Christmas 
 bells still hover; the village folk have gathered, 
 "in their best dresses and their best faces"; the 
 beautiful service of the church has been read and 
 answered with heartfelt responses, the familiar story 
 has been told again simply and urgently, with appli- 
 cations for every thankful soul, and then the con- 
 gregation has gone to its homes and its festivities. 
 
 All these things, I am sure, lie within Rosalind's 
 vision, although she seems to see nothing but the 
 ruddy blaze of the fire; all these things I see, as I 
 have seen them these many Christmas Eves agone ; 
 but with this familiar landscape there are mingled 
 all the sweet and sorrowful memories of our com- 
 mon life, recalled at this hour that the light of the 
 
40 MY STUDY FIRE. 
 
 highest truth may interpret them anew in the divine 
 language of hope. I read on until I come to the 
 quotation from the "Hymn to the Nativity," and 
 then I close the book, and take up a copy of Mil- 
 ton close at hand. We have had our commemora- 
 tion service of love, and now there comes into our 
 thought, with the organ roll of this sublime hymn, 
 the universal truth which lies at the heart of the 
 season. I am hardly conscious that it is my voice 
 which makes these words audible : I am conscious 
 only of this mighty-voiced anthem, fit for the choral 
 song of the morning stars : 
 
 " Ring out, ye crystal spheres, 
 
 And bless our human ears, 
 If ye have power to touch our senses so ; 
 
 And let your silver chime 
 
 Move in melodious time ; 
 And let the bass of heaven's deep organ blow ; 
 And, with your ninefold harmony, 
 Make up full concert to the angelic symphony. 
 
 " For, if such holy song 
 
 Enwrap our fancy long, 
 Time will run back and fetch the age of gold ; 
 
 And speckled vanity 
 
 Will sicken soon and die, 
 And leprous sin will melt from earthly mold ; 
 And hell itself will pass away, 
 And leave her dolorous mansions to the peering day. 
 
 ' ' The oracles are dumb, 
 No voice or hideous hum 
 Runs through the arched roof in words deceiving ; 
 
CHRIS TMA S EVE. 4 r 
 
 Apollo from his shrine 
 
 Can no more divine 
 With hollow shriek the steep of Delphos leaving, 
 No nightly trance or breathed spell 
 Inspires the pale-eyed priest from the prophetic cell. 
 
 " The lonely mountains o'er, 
 
 And the resounding shore, 
 A voice of weeping heard and loud lament ; 
 
 From haunted spring, and dale 
 
 Edged with poplars pale, 
 The parting genius is with sighing sent ; 
 With flower-enwoven tresses torn, 
 The nymphs in twilight shades of tangled thickets mourn." 
 
 Like a psalm the great Hymn fills the air, and 
 like a psalm it remains in the memory. The fire 
 has burned low, and a soft and solemn light fills the 
 room. Neither of us speaks while the clock strikes 
 twelve. I look out of the window. The heavens 
 are ablaze with light, and somewhere amid those 
 circling constellations I know that a new star has 
 found its place, and is shining with such a ray as 
 never before fell from heaven to earth. 
 
CHAPTER VII. 
 
 NEW YEAR'S EVE. 
 
 The last fire of many that have blazed on my 
 hearth these twelve months gone is fast sinking into 
 ashes. I do not care to revive its expiring flame, 
 because I find its slow fading into darkness har- 
 monious with the hour and the thought which 
 comes with it as the shadow follows the cloud. 
 While it is true that our division of time into years 
 is purely conventional, and finds no recognition or 
 record on the great dial face of the heavens, no man 
 can be quite oblivious of it. New Year's eve is 
 like every other night ; there is no pause in the 
 march of the universe, no breathless moment of 
 silence among created things that the passage of 
 another twelve months may be noted ; and yet no 
 man has quite the same thoughts this evening that 
 come with the coming of darkness on other nights. 
 The vast and shadowy stream of time sweeps on 
 without break, but the traveler who has been journey- 
 ing with it cannot be entirely unmindful that he is 
 perceptibly nearer the end of his wanderings. It is 
 an old story, this irresistible and ceaseless onflow of 
 life and time; time always scattering the flowers of 
 life with a lavish hand along its course; but each 
 42 
 
NE IV YEAR 'S EVE. 43 
 
 man recalls it for himself and to each it wears some 
 new aspect. The vision of Mirza never wholly 
 fades from the sight of men. 
 
 From such thoughts as these, which would be 
 commonplace enough if it were not for the pathos 
 in them, I am recalled by a singular play of the expir- 
 ing flames on the titles of my books. Many of 
 these are so indistinct that I cannot read them; 
 indeed, the farther corners of the room are lost 
 entirely in the gloom that is fast gaining on the dying 
 light. But there are two rows of books whose 
 titles I discover readily as I sit before the fire, and I 
 note that they are the great, vital works which 
 belong to all races and times ; the books which form 
 the richest inheritance of each new generation, and 
 which the whole world has come to hold as its best 
 possession. In the deepening shadows, and at this 
 solitary hour, there is something deeply significant, 
 something solemn and consoling, in the great names 
 which I read there. A multitude of other names, 
 full of light and beauty in their time, have been 
 remorselessly swept into oblivion by the fading of 
 the light ; at this moment they are as utterly vanished 
 as if they had never been. But these other names — 
 and I note among them Homer, Dante, Shakes- 
 peare, Milton, Goethe, Cervantes — stand out clear 
 and familiar amid even the shadows. 
 
 I recall the old maxim of the English common 
 law, that no time runs against the king, and I see at 
 a glance the deep and wide meaning which escapes 
 
44 MY STUDY FIRE. 
 
 from the meshes of legal interpretation. Here truly 
 are the kings, and to them time is as if it were not. 
 It has run against the Greek race and the Greek 
 language, but not against Homer; it has run against 
 medieval Florence and the Italy just on the thresh- 
 old of the Renaissance, but not against Dante; it has 
 run against the sturdy England of Elizabeth, but 
 not against Shakespeare. All are dead save the 
 kings, and when one remembers what they have 
 outlived of power and wealth and learning and 
 civilization, one feels that here are the inheritors 
 of immortality. A library is, more truly than any 
 other place to which men may go, a place of refuge 
 against time. Not that time does not come here ; 
 those forgotten names on the upper shelves bear 
 witness to its power ; but here, at least, are some 
 whose serene faces have the majesty of a work of 
 Phidias ; that large, calm, penetrating look of 
 immortality of the elder kings when they stood in 
 unbroken line with the gods. Every library which 
 has its poets' corner — and what library has not? — 
 possesses the memorials of royalty more truly than 
 Westminster itself; more really, in fact, because 
 these kings are not dead. They sway a mightier 
 host today than ever before, and the boundaries of 
 their common realm are also the frontier lines of 
 civilization. In such company the passage of time 
 is, after all, a thing of little account. It destroys 
 only the imperfect, the partial, the limited, the 
 transitory ; here are the truths over which time has 
 
NEW YEAR'S EVE. 45 
 
 no power, because they are part of that eternity to 
 which it is itself tributary. And just here is the 
 secret of the immortality which these kings have 
 inherited ; they have passed through all the appear- 
 ances«of things, the passing symbols and the imper- 
 fect embodiments of truth to truth itself, which is 
 contemporaneous with every age and race. Time 
 destroys only the symbols and the inadequate expres- 
 sion of truth, but it is powerless to touch truth. The 
 writers who were once famous and now forgotten 
 were men who caught the aspect of the hour and 
 gave it graceful or forceful expression; but when 
 the hour passed, the book which grew out of it went 
 with it as the flower goes with the season which 
 saw its blossoming. The book of the moment often 
 has immense vogue, while the book of the age, which 
 comes in its company from the press, lies unnoticed; 
 but the great book has its revenge. It lives to see 
 its contemporary pushed up shelf by shelf until it 
 finds its final resting-place in the garret or the 
 auction room. 
 
 The conviction deepens in me year by year that 
 the best possible education which any man can 
 acquire is a genuine and intimate acquaintance with 
 these few great minds who have escaped the wrecks 
 of time and have become, with the lapse of years, a 
 kind of impersonal wisdom, summing up the com- 
 mon experience of the race and distilling it drop by 
 drop into the perfect forms of art. The man who 
 knows his Homer thoroughly knows more about the 
 
46 MY STUDY FIRE. 
 
 Greeks than he who has familiarized himself with 
 all the work of the archaeologist and philologist and 
 historians of the Homeric age; the man who has 
 mastered Dante has penetrated the secret of medie- 
 valism ; the man who counts Shakespeare as his 
 friend can afford to leave most other books about 
 Elizabeth's England unread. To really know 
 Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, and Goethe is to know 
 the best the world has thought and said and done, 
 is to enter into that inheritance of experience and 
 knowledge which is the truest, and at bottom the 
 only, education. Most of us know too many writ- 
 ers, and waste our strength in a vain endeavor to 
 establish relations of intimacy with a multitude of 
 men, great and small, who profess to have some 
 claim upon us. It is both pleasant and wise to 
 have a large acquaintance, to know life broadly and 
 at its best ; but our intimate friends can never, in 
 the nature of things, be many. We may know a 
 host of interesting people, but we can really live 
 with but a few. And it is these few and faithful 
 ones whose names I see in the dying light of the old 
 year and the first faint gleam of the new. 
 
CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 a scholar's dream. 
 
 The delicate hands of the little clock on the man- 
 tel indicated that thirty minutes had passed since 
 the musical chimes within had rung eleven. The 
 open fire below was burning brightly, for the flame 
 had eaten into the heart of the back log, and was 
 transmuting its slow, rich growth into a warm glow 
 that touched the outlines of the room with a soft 
 splendor and made a charming picture of its mingled 
 lights and shadows. The learning of the world 
 rose tier above tier on the shelves that filled the 
 space between floor and ceiling, and following the 
 lines of gold lettering along the unbroken rows one 
 read august and imperial names in the kingdom of 
 thought. An ample writing-table, piled high with 
 pamphlets and books, stood in the center of the 
 room, and the loose sheets of paper carelessly thrown 
 together gave evidence of a work only recently in- 
 terrupted. Without, the solemn silence of midnight 
 and the radiant stars brooded over the stainless 
 fields, white with freshly fallen snow. 
 
 Ralph Norton had been looking into the fire these 
 thirty minutes, in a meditation that was almost 
 wholly pathetic. His seventy years passed in swift 
 47 
 
4^ MY STUDY FIRE. 
 
 procession before him, coming up one by one out of 
 the invisible past, and pronouncing an inaudible 
 judgment upon his career. There was a presence 
 of indefinable and unusual solemnity in the time, 
 for it was the close of a century, and in a brief half- 
 hour another hundred years would be rounded to 
 completion. By the common judgment of the 
 thinking world, Ralph Norton was the foremost 
 man of his age; no other had felt its doubts so 
 keenly, or drank in its inspiration with such a 
 mighty thirst as he. His thought had searched into 
 its secret places and mastered all its wisdom ; his 
 heart had felt its deep pulsations in the solitude of 
 unbroken and heroic studies ; his genius had given 
 its spirit a voice of matchless compass and eloquence. 
 For half a century the world had laid his words to 
 heart, and built its faith upon his thinking. While 
 the busy tides of activity ebbed and flowed through 
 the great channels of civilization, he had lived apart 
 in a deep, earnest, and whole-hearted consecration to 
 truth. The clearly cut features, the keen, benignant 
 eyes, the noble poise of head, the wistful expression 
 as of one striving to pierce the heart of some mys- 
 tery, were signs of a personality that had left its 
 impress on two generations, and now, in its grand 
 maturity, was still waiting for some larger fulfill- 
 ment of the promise of life. Behind him, among 
 the throng of books, indistinguishable in the dim 
 light, were the works into which the life of his life 
 had gone. They recorded explorations into many 
 
A SCHOLAR'S DUE AM. 49 
 
 fields, they had torn down old faiths amid storms of 
 discussion and condemnation, they had laid new 
 foundations for belief in the silence of meditative and 
 self-forgetful years. The strength and the weak- 
 ness of the age had written themselves upon those 
 pages, in the ebbing of inherited belief and the in- 
 flow of convictions born out of new insight into and 
 new contact with the experiences of life. 
 
 The old man sat motionless, with his eyes fixed on 
 the slow moving hands ; he seemed to be number- 
 ing the brief moments of his unfinished career. The 
 century which had spoken through him was ebbing 
 to its last second, and as it sank silently into the gulf 
 of years his own thought seemed to pause in its dar- 
 ing flight, his own voice to sink into silence. The 
 age and its master had done their work, and now, 
 in the dim light of a room over which the spirit of 
 the one had brooded and in which the brain and 
 hand of the other had wrought, they were about to 
 separate. The delicate hands moved on without 
 consciousness of the mighty life whose limits they 
 were fast registering, the stars looked down from 
 the eternity in which they shone unmindful of the 
 change from era to era, the world of men was re- 
 mote and unconscious; the old man was alone with 
 the sinking fire and the passing century. The min- 
 ute hand moved on, the fire flashed up fitfully and 
 sank down in ashes, there was a moment of hush, 
 and then slowly and solemnly the chimes in the lit- 
 tle clock rang twelve. Norton shivered as if a sud- 
 
5° MY STUDY FIRE. 
 
 den chill had struck him, and peal on peal through 
 the midnight air the bells rang in a new century. 
 
 The man who had worked as few men work, and 
 yet had shown no signs of breaking, felt strangely- 
 old in a moment, and the carol of the bells, flinging 
 across the hills their jubilant welcome of the new 
 time, struck on his inner ear like a requiem for a 
 past that was irrevocably gone. In an instant life 
 lost its familiar and homelike aspect, the impalpa- 
 ble presence of the new century rose like a vast 
 empty house through which no human feet had 
 walked, in which no human hearts had beat, over 
 which no atmosphere of hope and love and dear old 
 usage hung warm and genial. Norton had become 
 a stranger ; his citizenship had gone with the age 
 which had conferred it ; his friendships seemed dim 
 and ghostly, like myths out of which the currents 
 of life had ebbed. With a sinking heart, groping 
 like one suddenly become blind for some familiar 
 thing, he turned and looked at the row of books be- 
 hind him upon whose covers his name was stamped. 
 In the receding world that was swiftly moving 
 away from him they alone remained faithful. 
 
 "My life is but a breath," he said, as his eye fell 
 upon them; "but thought does not die, and here I 
 have written my own immortality. Here is the rec- 
 ord of all I have felt and thought and done. These 
 books are myself ; and though I perish I live again. ' ' 
 
 The old man's eye ran down the line, and re- 
 called, as it fell upon volume after volume, how 
 
A SCHOLAR'S DREAM. 51 
 
 each had grown into being. Here were books of 
 keen, open-eyed and tireless observation, into which 
 had gone years of unbroken study of external life, 
 with such fruitful results as come to the man of 
 trained faculty, of deep insight and of heroic pa- 
 tience. Here were works of daring speculation that 
 had traversed the whole realm of knowledge and 
 struck luminous lines of order through many an out- 
 lying darkness. Upon these volumes Norton's eye 
 rested with peculiar delight ; those which had gone 
 before were only his careful reports of the world 
 without him, these were the mighty lines into which 
 he had put his meditations on the problems of the 
 universe; these were the utterance of his ripest 
 thought, the fruitage of his best hours, the outcome 
 of his long training, his laborious studies, his whole 
 thoughtful life. In these books he knew that the 
 vanished century had written itself most deeply and 
 truly. Here were the eloquent lines in which its 
 very soul seemed to burn with self-revealing splen- 
 dor; here were its affirmations and its negations; 
 here was, in a word, the sum and substance of that 
 individual thought, spirit, sentiment, which made 
 it different from the centuries that went before and 
 would forever keep it distinct and apart from the 
 centuries that were to follow. 
 
 At the end of the shelf was a thin volume, modest, 
 unpretentious, almost trivial beside the greater 
 works around it. The light of pride faded out of 
 the old man's eyes when they rested upon this little 
 
52 MY STUDY FIRE. 
 
 book, and a deep, unutterable pathos filled them 
 with unshed tears. There had been one year of his 
 prosperous life when the light of the sun was dark- 
 ened and the beauty of the heavens overhung with 
 clouds ; one year when his habits of investigation 
 had been cast aside ; when thinking mocked him 
 with its insufficiency and the search for truth seemed 
 idle and unreal; one year when the sorrows of his 
 own heart rolled like billows over the pursuits of 
 his mind, over the aims of his career, and rose until 
 they threatened the whole universe in which he 
 lived. He ceased to observe, to speculate, and 
 only felt. The training of the schools, the long dis- 
 cipline of his maturity, the gifts and acquisitions of 
 which lifted him above his fellow, seemed to vanish 
 out of his life and left him only human ; he was one 
 with the vast throng about him who were toiling, 
 loving, suffering and dying under all the manifold 
 experiences of humanity. In that year there was 
 much that was sacred and incommunicable, much 
 that had receded into the silence of his deeper self; 
 but months later, when the agony of grief had spent 
 itself and the passion and bitterness had gone, while 
 the heart was yet tender and tremulous with sympa- 
 thy, this little book had been born. It was a tran- 
 scription of experience ; there were training, culture, 
 deep thought on every page, but these were fused, 
 vitalized, humanized by suffering, by struggle, by 
 aspiration. It was a chapter out of living history; 
 the mind of the universe was there in hint and sug- 
 
A SCHOLAR'S DREAM. 53 
 
 gestion of bold thought, but the heart of the uni- 
 verse was still more truly there in hushed pulsations. 
 
 Norton rose from his chair and took the book 
 from its place on the shelf. Its covers were worn 
 as if with much handling, its pages bore evidence of 
 frequent reading, and as the leaves fell apart in his 
 hand tender and sorrowful memories came back to 
 the lonely old man with a strange pathos. He held 
 the worn book almost reverently, the music of un- 
 forgotten years sounded again in his soul, buried 
 hopes rose from their sepulchers and were radiant 
 with life and promise as of old, love that had been 
 groping and waiting in the shadows of eternity these 
 many years once more had vision of vanished faces, 
 and all the sweet use and habit of happy days re- 
 turned with their precious ministries. Norton 
 opened page after page of the past as he turned 
 page after page of the little book. 
 
 "The world cares little for this," he said to him- 
 self at last, as he returned it to its place ; "this is 
 only for me ; time will leave it with the age which 
 saw its birth, as a thing too trivial and personal to 
 be carried on the march." 
 
 Then he sat down once more, gathered the few 
 coals together, blew them into a little glow and re- 
 kindled the dead fire. The bells had long been 
 silent and the first hour of the new age was already 
 spent. The old man watched the fire as it rose 
 cheerfully out of the ashes of the earlier burning, 
 receiving the touch of flame from it and then send- 
 
54 MY STUDY FIRE. 
 
 ing out its own new glow and heat. Out of this 
 simple process, which he had watched a thousand 
 times before, a truth seemed to take form and pro- 
 ject itself far on into the coming time. The past 
 slowly drifted out of his thought, which moved for- 
 ward as if to discover what lay behind the veil of 
 the future. The low, monotonous ticking of the 
 little clock became, in his ears, the audible pulsa- 
 tions of time. At first the beats were slow and far 
 apart, but as he listened they seemed to multiply, 
 the minutes swiftly lengthened into hours, the hours 
 ran into years, and the years moved on silently into 
 centuries. 
 
 Almost without surprise Norton felt that two 
 centuries had gone. He turned from the fire on 
 which his gaze had been fixed and looked about the 
 room. It was still the working room of a man of 
 letters, but it was strangely changed. Books rose as 
 formerly from floor to ceiling in unbroken ranks, 
 but Norton, whose knowledge of literature had been 
 so exact and comprehensive, knew barely one of the 
 names stamped on the backs. His eye ran anx- 
 iously along the titles, and when it rested upon a 
 familiar name he found but a tithe of the works 
 which he had once known. Here and there a soli- 
 tary volume greeted him like a friend in a crowd of 
 strange faces. He searched for books that had been 
 his hourly companions and discovered only here and 
 there a single thin volume, the sole residuum of a 
 system of thought. With a pathetic interest he read 
 
A SCHOLAR'S DREAM. 55 
 
 the names that were meaningless to him, and taking 
 down one of the strange volumes opened it at ran- 
 dom. The first sentence that met his eye was a 
 quotation from himself, the second commented upon 
 his thought as an illustration of the crude methods 
 and untrustworthy results of earlier observers. 
 "This writer from whom I have quoted," the au- 
 thor went on to say, "was a man whose integrity of 
 mind was unquestioned by his contemporaries and 
 must be undoubted by us, but, in the light of later 
 research, it is difficult to understand how so keen 
 an intellect could have mistaken so entirely the evi- 
 dent teaching of fact." Norton closed the book 
 with a sinking heart. The theory held up as a con- 
 spicuous error was one upon which he had spent 
 years of thought, and upon which his fame had 
 largely rested. 
 
 He took down another volume and opened it also 
 at random. He read the first page carefully, and 
 with a growing confusion of thought. There were 
 sentences which he could understand, but the page 
 was incomprehensible to him. He read it more 
 slowly and with an instinctive perception that it was 
 a piece of close reasoning, but its meaning wholly 
 eluded him. He caught glimpses of it and then it 
 slipped away into mystery again. The writer's 
 standpoint was so novel that he could not readily 
 reach it; natural processes and forces were sug- 
 gested of which he was entirely ignorant. He 
 opened book after book with the same result ; a 
 
56 MY STUDY FIRE. 
 
 feeling of unutterable solitude came over him as it 
 slowly dawned upon him that two centuries inter- 
 vened between his thought and that of the men 
 whose works were gathered around him. He was an 
 alien in an age which had no place for him; a stran- 
 ger in a world out of which all familiar objects had 
 vanished. 
 
 At last he remembered his own work, and searched 
 eagerly from case to case for the books into which 
 he had poured the wealth of his mental life. Not 
 a single volume was there, and the old thinker 
 turned away with a despairing sigh. 
 
 "With all my conscience, my self-denial, my 
 toil, I lived in vain," he said to himself. Then, 
 feeling for a moment the force of an old habit, he 
 drew a chair up to the writing-table and sat down. 
 He grew more and more confused; the very titles 
 on the pamphlets scattered over the table were in- 
 comprehensible to him. He glanced at the fire, and 
 its flames were strange; they were fed by some 
 material unknown to him ; the old familiar world 
 had drifted hopelessly away. 
 
 Upon the writing-table lay a little volume with a 
 few freshly written sheets folded between its pages. 
 Norton opened the book mechanically, and then, 
 with a suddenly aroused interest, turned quickly 
 from page to page. The sight of the words was like 
 the sound of a familiar voice in the darkness, or the 
 opening of a window upon some familiar landscape. 
 A soft light came into his eyes and his face flushed 
 
A SCHOLAR'S DREAM. 57 
 
 with inexpressible happiness. The little book was 
 his own thought and speech ; not the outcome of 
 his speculation and research, but the utterance of 
 his one year of deep interior life. He glanced 
 through it lovingly as one would read the soul of a 
 friend, catching here and there some well-remem- 
 bered sentence, some word stamped in the fire of 
 his great trial, some phrase wrung out of his very 
 soul. It mattered little to him now that the great 
 works out of which he had thought to build an 
 earthly immortality had vanished ; this deepest and 
 truest word of his soul, this most vital and genuine 
 outcome of his life, had survived the touch of time 
 and still spoke to a living generation. As he turned 
 from page to page the loose sheets slipped from the 
 book upon the table. They had evidently been re- 
 cently written, and seemed to be personal reflections 
 rather than any formal composition. 
 
 "I have come to a place in my life," said the un- 
 known writer, "from which I look back upon the 
 past as one looks over a long course from the sum- 
 mit that commands it all. I have attained a great 
 age and great honors, as the world counts honors, 
 knowing perfectly that achievements are relative, 
 not positive, and that I am simply less ignorant, not 
 more learned, than my fellows. I find myself every- 
 where spoken of and written about as the first man 
 of the age, its voice, prophet, interpreter, and what 
 not, with a keen sense of the poverty of a century 
 that can read its deepest thought in aught that I 
 
5 8 MY STUDY FIRE. 
 
 have said or written. I have given my life to the 
 search for truth ; I have traveled here and there for 
 new outlooks; I have withdrawn into deep seclu- 
 sions for new insights; I have questioned all the 
 sciences that have grown to such vast proportions, 
 and tell us so fully and so accurately of the methods 
 of being, but leave us as much in the dark as ever 
 concerning its secret; I have drank deep at the 
 fountains of ancient learning; I have studied all 
 literatures and looked long and earnestly into the 
 soul of man in the revelation of books. In a word, 
 I have traversed the whole world of knowledge, and 
 now, at the summit of my years, with such rewards 
 as the reverence of all men can give me. I return to 
 the point whence I set out. The universe still 
 sweeps beyond me vaster and remoter for all my 
 struggle to master it, the illimitable abysses are 
 more awful because I have looked into them, the 
 mystery of life is more insoluble because I have 
 striven to pierce it. I have simply learned to live 
 my own personal life with fortitude, patience, and 
 trust. 
 
 "In my youth I came upon this little book, and 
 was deeply moved by the disclosure of a suffering 
 soul I found in it, by its unforced and unstudied 
 depth of feeling, by the intensity of its humanity, 
 by its agony, its love, and its faith. I learned it 
 almost by heart, and then I passed on into studies 
 and speculations which seemed to dwarf it by their 
 vastness. But I come back again to the goal from 
 
A SCHOLAR'S DREAM. 59 
 
 which I set out, to the guide who first opened the 
 depths of my life, and who, through his own suffer- 
 ing, found the pathway into the heart of the mys- 
 tery which I have missed in all my searching. When 
 I remember how earnestly men have striven to think 
 their way into the secrets of the universe, and how 
 certainly they have failed, I see clearly that only he 
 who lives into truth finds it, and that love alone is 
 immortal." 
 
 Here the writing ended, and Norton felt himself 
 in the presence of a mind as great and as sincere as 
 his own. He replaced the loose sheets in the vol- 
 ume and laid the little book in its place; in his joy 
 that any impulse from his own heart had touched 
 and inspired another across the gulf of years he had 
 found the true immortality. The fire had burned 
 out, and as he bent over it to find some live coal 
 among the ashes, the little clock on the mantel 
 chimed two, and with a start he found himself in 
 his own study. 
 
CHAPTER IX. 
 
 A FLAME OF DRIFTWOOD. 
 
 We have been sitting to-night before a fire of 
 driftwood, and, as the many-colored flames have 
 shot up, flickered, and gone out, thought has made 
 all manner of vagrant journeyings. Rosalind has 
 occasionally commented on some splendid tongue 
 of fire, but for the most part we have been silent. 
 There are nights — nodes ambrosiamz — when inspir- 
 ing talk, that nectar of the gods, has held us long 
 and made us reluctant to cover the smoldering 
 embers. There are other nights when we fall under 
 some spell of silence, and the world without us stirs 
 into strange vividness the world within, and the 
 chief importance of things visible and tangible seem 
 to be their power to loosen thought and set it free 
 to spread its wings in the empyrean. When one 
 falls into this mood and sits slippered and at ease 
 before the crooning fire, while the wintry winds are 
 trumpeting abroad, one easily comprehends the 
 charm of Oriental mysticism ; the charm of unbroken 
 silence in which one pursues and at last overtakes 
 himself. The world has vanished like a phantasma- 
 goria; duties and cares and responsibilities have 
 gone with the material relations and pursuits which 
 60 
 
A FLAME OF DRIFTWOOD. 6 1 
 
 gave them birth; one is alone with himself, and 
 within the invisible horizons of his own thought all 
 mysteries are hidden and revealed. I have often 
 thought that if I ever turn heretic I shall be a fire- 
 worshiper. These volatile flames have immense 
 powers of disintegration; one can imagine the visi- 
 ible universe crumbling into ashes at their touch. 
 But when they dance before the eye the disintegra- 
 tion they effect has something of the miracle of crea- 
 tion in it ; so alive does the imagination become when 
 this glow touches it, so swift is thought to pursue 
 and overtake that which entirely eludes it by the 
 light of day! I can hardly imagine myself sitting 
 motionless in broad daylight, in the unbroken 
 calm of an anticipated Nirvana; but I can easily 
 fancy myself under the perpetual spell of the fire 
 spirit dreaming forever of worlds in which I have 
 never lived. 
 
 The peculiar fascination of a driftwood fire is 
 partly material and partly imaginative. The bril- 
 liancy of the flame, the unexpected transformations 
 of color, the swift movement of the restless waves 
 of fire from log to log, the sudden splendor of hue 
 breaking out of smoky blackness — all these material 
 features supplement the unfailing association of the 
 fagots themselves. They have no audible speech to 
 report their journeyings, but the tropical richness of 
 the flame which consumes them hints at all manner 
 of strange wanderings in remote and strange parts of 
 the earth. The secret of the sea where it breaks, 
 
62 ' MY STUDY FIRE. 
 
 phosphorescent, on the islands of the equator, seems 
 to be hiding itself within those weird, bewildering 
 flames. One feels as if he were near the mystery 
 of that vast, dim life of the great seas so alien from 
 all save the kindred solitariness and majesty of the 
 heavens ; one feels as if something deeper and 
 stranger than articulate life were revealing itself 
 before him, if he but had the wit to understand it. 
 This vast, silent world which girdles our little world 
 of speech and action, as the great seas hold some 
 island locked in their immeasurable wastes — is it not 
 this sublime background of mystery which gives our 
 books, our art, our achievements, their deepest and 
 most pathetic meaning? One lays down a great 
 book with a penetrating sense of its inadequacy. 
 Judged by any human standard, we recognize its 
 noble completeness ; but measured against the world 
 of suffering which it portrays, how like a solitary star 
 it shines out of gulfs of impenetrable darkness! 
 Scholars are still discussing the problem which 
 Shakespeare presented in "Hamlet"; but as one 
 takes up the tragedy in some moment of deeper 
 insight and becomes suddenly conscious in his own 
 thought of its deeper significance, becomes suddenly 
 aware of the outlying gloom in which the poet's 
 torch is swallowed up, how small the question 
 of real or feigned insanity becomes! The slow 
 transformation of purpose into action has never 
 been more completely or more marvelously told 
 than in "The Ring and the Book." Never before 
 
A FLAME OF DRIFTWOOD. 63 
 
 have the secret processes of different minds been 
 studied with such intensity of insight and brought 
 to light with such vividness and splendor of expres- 
 sion. But when Count Guido and Pompilia and 
 Caponsacchi and the Pope have each told their 
 story, is it not the finest result of Browning's art that 
 the pathos of the tragedy oppresses us as something 
 still unexpressed, something essentially inexpress- 
 ible? The secret of every great work of art is its 
 power to send the imagination to search for itself 
 in the dim world out of which it comes, never as a 
 perfect creation, but always as a witness to the 
 existence of something greater than itself. Our 
 noblest words and works are to the great realities 
 which they strive to reveal what the text-books of 
 astronomy are to the immeasurable heavens of which 
 they speak. It would be a poor world if any genius 
 of man could fathom it and any language of man 
 express it ! 
 
 As the driftwood fire flickers and dances, I seem 
 to feel about me the vast, dim seas whose hidden 
 splendor it has brought into my study, and touched 
 the oldest books with a new association, with a deep 
 and strange suggestiveness. How imperfect are the 
 most famous of these transcriptions of the soul and 
 the wonderful world through which it travels; and 
 yet how marvelously true and deep they are! Like 
 these fagots, carelessly gathered on the beach, they 
 have caught the secret of the fathomless deeps, and 
 they are touched with a beauty not their own. 
 
CHAPTER X. 
 
 DREAM WORLDS. 
 
 Rosalind is not always quite sure that my occu- 
 pations are entirely profitable. I notice at times an 
 uncertain expression in her face when she finds me 
 brooding over some old myth for hours together. I 
 am conscious of a disapproval which is rarely ex- 
 pressed, but which is none the less unmistakable in 
 a nature so unflinchingly and uncompromisingly hon- 
 est. I do not mean that Rosalind has no liking for 
 fables or old legends. On the contrary, I have 
 heard her read the "Tanglewood Tales" and "Won- 
 der Book" so many times to the children that I 
 associate certain clear tones of her voice and certain 
 characteristic accentuations with passages in the 
 story of Midas and of Perseus. Rosalind's doubt is 
 in regard to the great value which I attach to these 
 venerable fictions, and to the very considerable time 
 I often devote to them. Last night, after I had given 
 the fire a rattling overhauling, and had settled back 
 again in my chair to further reading of a new and 
 fascinating book of popular tales, I noticed the faint- 
 est possible skepticism in Rosalind's face. Rosa- 
 lind sometimes permits herself to suspect that I 
 am wasting a day, and I fear there are occasional 
 64 
 
DREAM WORLDS. 65 
 
 grounds for such a suspicion. There are days when 
 the mind refuses to be put to any service; it lounges 
 about according to its mood, and yields neither to 
 persuasion nor to command. At such times I find 
 myself obliged to keep my mind company, and I 
 have no sense of responsibility for wasted time. 
 
 I am by no means certain that such days are lost; 
 I am rather of opinion that they are days of special 
 fertility, and that the mind comes back from its 
 wanderings quickened and enriched by new con- 
 tacts with life and truth. While Goldsmith was 
 playing his flute for rustic dances in French villages, 
 he was storing up impressions and experiences that 
 were to add a flavor to all his later work. But this 
 reaction of the mind against routine, or against work 
 of any kind, is not so much what I am thinking 
 about now as that kind of fruitful dreaming out of 
 which myths, legends, and imaginary creations of all 
 sorts spring. It is surprising to find how many of 
 the greatest works of literature have their roots in 
 this withdrawal from the actual in order that the ideal 
 may be approached and possessed. Last evening, 
 when I noticed the faint touch of skepticism on 
 Rosalind's face, I was quite ready to defend myself ; 
 in fact, that charming woman often tells me that I 
 defend myself when no attack is intended ; and this, 
 I have no doubt, she recognizes as a slight stirring 
 of conscience on my part, and so receives fresh con- 
 firmation of her suspicions. I long ago recognized 
 the fact that, as all roads lead to Rome, so do all 
 5 
 
66 MY STUDY FIRE. 
 
 devices end in disaster when the woman who knows 
 one best is concerned. Peter the Great finally- 
 learned the secret of victory at the hands of the foes 
 who so long defeated him ; but in the peaceful war- 
 fare which I have in mind, he is the wisest man who 
 learns soonest that defeat is inevitable, and that 
 resignation is the single flower that blooms on these 
 well-contested fields. There are times when victory 
 seems assured ; one is armed at all points, and has 
 made the most careful disposition of his forces. 
 The enemy seems to have a foreboding of defeat; 
 there is a lack of spirit in her resistance ; she soon 
 yields and draws one on, careless and confident. 
 Suddenly there is a portentous change; the right 
 wing is turned and flying, the left wing follows suit; 
 the center is seized with sudden panic, and gives 
 way at the first attack. The reserve is brought up, 
 and promptly routed, and one retires at last from 
 the field, not sullen, but dazed, confused, and 
 hopelessly perplexed. By every known law of 
 military science he ought to have held his ground 
 and routed the foe ; his arguments were overpower- 
 ing, his facts invincible ; nevertheless he is a soli- 
 tary fugitive. Those who have not gone through 
 the experience will doubt this record of it ; those 
 who have passed through its varied phases will 
 instantly recognize its fidelity to nature, and will 
 decline to confirm it ; there is a conspiracy of silence 
 on this subject among those who have fallen victims 
 to rash confidence in their powers. It must be 
 
DREAM WORLDS. 67 
 
 added that nothing can exceed the delicacy of 
 behavior on the part of the victor on such occasions. 
 It is only by a little increase of color, an irrepress- 
 ible light in the eye, that the consciousness of suc- 
 cess is betrayed. Friendly relations are immediately 
 resumed, and one is even deluded into the convic- 
 tion that his defeat was more apparent than real, 
 and that in disaster his own greatness has become 
 more evident, and been instantly recognized. This 
 is a delightful feeling, and it survives as long as it 
 remains unexpressed. 
 
 This is a long digression, but an open fire sings 
 as many tunes as one has moods, and I make no 
 apology for rambling from my subject. At that 
 very moment Goethe's "Autobiography" lay open 
 in Rosalind's lap; I gently disentangled it from 
 some of that ornamental work which fringes all a 
 woman's occupations, and read the legend of the 
 poet's youth which he calls "The New Paris." 
 Goethe learned very early to tell stories acceptably ; 
 he came naturally by an art in which his mother 
 excelled, of whom he says — 
 
 "Von Mtitterchen die Frohnatur 
 Und Lust zu fabuliren." 
 
 His playfellows were constantly entertained by the 
 recitals of his marvelous adventures, and they were 
 delighted especially with his report of a certain 
 garden into which he found his way through a gate 
 in the city walls, and within whose magical boun- 
 
68 MY STUDY FIRE. 
 
 daries all manner of strange things were seen by 
 the adventurous boy. This was told so often and 
 with such circumstantiality that it was accepted as 
 fact not only by the listeners, but by the narrator 
 himself. Each boy privately visited the part of the 
 wall where the gate was supposed to be, and each 
 found confirmation of the story. There were even 
 warm discussions as to the exact position of certain 
 wholly imaginary things which each one had seen. 
 
 Every one who has the privilege of being intrusted 
 with the confidences of children knows that the 
 imagination has an equal power with reality over 
 them. They make imaginary or dream worlds, and 
 sustain them by an unbroken faith until the light 
 of knowledge slowly and sadly disintegrates them. 
 The mind dreams, and creates worlds out of its 
 dreams, as naturally and as inevitably as it observes 
 and learns real things. 
 
 It is not surprising that a kinsman of one of the 
 greatest dreamers of modern times should have been 
 the architect of one of these ideal worlds. Hartley 
 Coleridge believed fully that some day a stream 
 would break out of the soil of a neighboring meadow, 
 and that along its swiftly created banks a new race 
 would find its home and a new life organize itself. 
 This was no vague dream; it was so real, so definite, 
 and so continuous that the boy knew its geography 
 as well as that of the country about it, and even 
 made an accurate map of it. This secret possession 
 of Hartley's imagination was shared by his brother 
 
DREAM WORLDS. 69 
 
 Derwent, and for years the two boys watched the 
 growth of nations in this invisible continent, the 
 evolution of national institutions, religions, and 
 laws; they were spectators of battles and civic con- 
 flicts; they knew the private histories of the great 
 generals and statesmen who arose from time to time ; 
 and in the long course of years they saw radical and 
 far-reaching changes of government and society. 
 Everybody remembers the ideal empire of Gom- 
 broon which De Quincey ruled in his youth, and the 
 government of which, in an evil hour, he divided 
 with his elder brother. The latter took such an 
 aggressive attitude toward the people of Gombroon 
 that the younger ruler was obliged to make a long 
 and desperate struggle to preserve their indepen- 
 dence. Things at length came to such a pass that, 
 in order to defeat the machinations of an unscrupu- 
 lous enemy, the creator of the invisible empire had 
 to face the question of destroying it. "Ah, but no! 
 I had contracted obligations to Gombroon ; I had 
 submitted my conscience to a yoke, and in secret 
 truth my will had no such autocratic power. Long 
 contemplation of a shadow, earnest study for the 
 welfare of that shadow, sympathy with the wounded 
 sensibilities of that shadow under accumulated 
 wrongs — these bitter experiences, nursed by brood- 
 ing thought, had gradually frozen that shadow into 
 a rigor of reality far denser than the material reali- 
 ties of brass or granite." 
 
 Such records of imaginative childhood as these 
 
7° MY STUDY FIRE. 
 
 might be multiplied indefinitely ; they register not 
 so much isolated activities as an inevitable and nor- 
 mal stage of development. It is a theory of mine 
 that childhood contains in the germ all that matu- 
 rity ever develops or displays, and I find particular 
 illustration of this in the persistence and splendor 
 with which this faculty of ideal creation has worked 
 in the literature of the world. For instance — it 
 occurs to me just here that I have wholly failed to 
 report the discussion between Rosalind and myself 
 which arose when I laid down the poker and set- 
 tled back in the easy-chair. I think it wisest, upon 
 the whole, to leave that conversation unrecorded, 
 but I hope no one will connect this decision on my 
 part with what I have written in a strictly general 
 way about such discussions. 
 
CHAPTER XI. 
 
 A TEXT FROM SIDNEY. 
 
 Rosalind has given me a text this evening. She 
 was reading Sidney's "Defense of Poesy," and, as 
 a contribution to a talk we had been having on 
 poetry, she read these words aloud: "Since, then, 
 poetry is of all human learnings the most ancient and 
 of most fatherly antiquity, as from whence other 
 learnings have taken their beginnings ; since it is so 
 universal that no learned nation doth despise it, nor 
 barbarous nation is without it; since both Roman 
 and Greek gave such divine names unto it, the one 
 of prophesying, the other of making, and that indeed 
 that name of making is fit for it, considering, that 
 where all other arts retain themselves within their 
 subject, and receive, as it were, their being from it, 
 the poet only, only bringeth his own stuff, and doth 
 not learn a conceit out of a matter, but maketh matter 
 for a conceit ... I think, and think I think rightly, 
 the laurel crown appointed for triumphant captains 
 doth worthily, of all other learnings, honor the poet's 
 triumph." These were familiar words, but they 
 fitted my mood so perfectly that I seemed to be 
 hearing them for the first time. I had spent the 
 whole day in a world which a great poet had formed 
 7i 
 
72 MY STUDY FIRE. 
 
 out of the stuff of his imagination ; a world sub- 
 limely ordered, as I looked into it, by the harmony 
 of the imagination and the practical reason ; the 
 one building out of unsubstantial thought and touch- 
 ing with a bewildering and elusive beauty, the other 
 molding the structure to human needs and shaping 
 it to human ends. The day made some escape from 
 its somber realities almost inevitable. Since early 
 morning the rain had fallen ceaselessly, with a 
 melancholy monotone that beat on one's heart. 
 Even the cheerful notes of the fire, singing lustily as 
 if to exorcise the demon of gloom and ennui, failed 
 to shut out the steady murmur of the water falling 
 from the leaden skies. Against such invasions of 
 darkness there is always a refuge in the imagination, 
 and I fled early to that nameless island in the un- 
 discovered sea where Shakespeare's "Tempest" 
 finds its sublime stage. Under the spell of this 
 magical vision I had forgotten lowering skies and 
 leaden-footed hours, and I was still in Shakespeare's 
 world when Rosalind read the words from the "De- 
 fense of Poesy" which I have quoted. 
 
 I had but to stretch my hand to a shelf at my 
 side to match the immortal young Elizabethan with 
 the deeper eloquence of the Greek thinker whose 
 speculations so often lead into the fields of poetry. 
 It is to the well-worn words of Socrates to Ion that 
 I open and read: "As the Corybantian revelers, 
 when they dance, are not in their right mind, so 
 the lyric poets are not in their right mind when 
 
A TEXT FROM SIDNEY. 73 
 
 they are composing their beautiful strains : but 
 when falling under the power of music and meter 
 they are inspired and possessed, like Bacchic maid- 
 ens who draw milk and honey from the rivers when 
 they are under the influence of Dionysius, but not 
 when they are in their right mind. And the soul of 
 the lyric poet does the same, as they themselves tell 
 us ; for they tell us that they gather their strains 
 from honeyed fountains out of the gardens and dells 
 of the Muses ; thither, like the bees, they wing their 
 way. And this is true. For the poet is a light and 
 winged and holy thing, and there is no invention in 
 him until he has been inspired, and is out of his 
 senses, and the mind is no longer in him. . . . For 
 in this way the' God would seem to indicate to us, 
 and not allow us to doubt that these beautiful poems 
 are not human or the work of man, but divine and 
 the word of God ; and that the poets are only the 
 interpreters of the gods by whom they are severally 
 possessed." 
 
 One needs nowadays to reinforce his faith in the 
 ancient supremacy of the imagination by some such 
 words as these from those masters of the higher rea- 
 son who have established the reality of their faith 
 by the sublimity and substance of their works. It 
 is as idle to question the authority of the imagination 
 in the presence of Shakespeare's "Tempest," or 
 Plato's 'Ton" or "Phsedo," as to dispute the reality 
 of music while Beethoven's "Fifth Symphony" or 
 Wagner's "Tristan and Isolde" hold us silent and 
 
74 MY STUDY FIRE. 
 
 responsive to we know not what unspoken messages 
 from some vaster world. It is not a matter of 
 demonstration, of evidence or proof or logical de- 
 duction ; it is always and only a flash of intelligence 
 through the spiritual sense. Well says Abt Vogler 
 in Robert Browning's wonderful exposition of the 
 whole matter : 
 
 "Why rushed the discords on, but that harmony should be 
 prized ? 
 Sorrow is hard to bear, and doubt is slow to clear ; 
 
 Each sufferer says his say, his scheme of the weal and 
 the woe ; 
 But God has a few of us whom he whispers in the ear ; 
 The rest may reason, and welcome ; 'tis we musicians 
 know." 
 
 Literary epochs come and go, forms of expression 
 change, but the method of the true poet remains 
 the same ; he does not reason — he sees, he hears, 
 he knows. The reality of the Ideal, of the Spiritual, 
 is never an open question with him; when it be- 
 comes one he ceases to be a poet. Skepticism 
 which stimulates science blights poetry ; the doubt 
 which sends the mind restlessly abroad destroys in 
 the same moment the home in which are the sources 
 of its joy and its inspiration. Nothing in life is quite 
 so pathetic as the artist who clings to his work after 
 he has begun to question its authority and validity. 
 The toil remains, but the unspeakable joy of it is 
 gone; and so also is that chance of possible perfec- 
 tion for the winning of which genius never hesitates 
 
A TEXT FROM SIDNEY. 75 
 
 to stake its all. It were better that the painters 
 who doubt whether it is worth while to paint, and 
 the musicians who question the sincerity of their 
 art, and the poets who are haunted with the fear 
 that the day of verse has gone, should refrain from 
 all endeavor, and the world wait for the sure hands 
 and the ringing voices that must bring back the 
 Ideal once more as certainly as the birds of April 
 will announce the summer, coming swiftly northward 
 with leaf for tree, and flower for stalk, and green 
 for brown, and the splendor of overflowing light for 
 days that are brief and shadowed. It is easy to 
 deny the existence of that which one does not and 
 cannot see, and this must be the cloak of charity 
 which one casts over those who write the epitaph of 
 the Imagination and record with funereal reiteration 
 the decline and disappearance of poetry. They do 
 not write poetry: therefore poetry has ceased to be. 
 Its sublime course runs out in a thin ripple of musi- 
 cal verse which only makes the glitter of the bare 
 sand beneath the more' obtrusive. There is a sure 
 refuge from all these faint and querulous vor'ces 
 which make the silence of the great woods, once 
 overflowing with affluent melodies, the more ap- 
 parent. These light-voiced singers sing their little 
 songs, not for the wide skies and the great stars and 
 the silent day perfumed with hidden flowers, but 
 for the ears of men. One has but to leave the outer 
 edges of the woodland to forget these feeble cries ; 
 one has but to seek the heart of the ancient forest 
 
76 MY STUDY FIRE. 
 
 to hear once more those magical notes which seem 
 to rise out of the hidden world about him and to 
 carry from its heart some secret to his own. The 
 voices are still there ; and, better than all, the sub- 
 lime mysteries which charge those voices with thrill- 
 ing music are there also. 
 
 Nature is still what she has been to all the great 
 poets from yEschylus to Emerson, although the 
 critics announce the final disappearance of the 
 "pathetic fallacy" which underlies Wordsworth's 
 verse. Poor critics ! their offense lies not in their 
 failure to see, but in their denial that Wordsworth 
 saw. Their own defect of vision makes them 
 certain that there is no true sight among men. But 
 those who see are not concerned with such denials; 
 for them the sky is blue, though an army of blind 
 men swear it black ; and to those who hear, life is 
 still thrilled with mysterious voices though the deaf 
 proclaim an eternal silence. Among so many 
 doubters and skeptics it is pleasant to hear still the 
 unbroken testimony of the older poets to the truths 
 that were clear to them when life and youth were 
 one. In his latest verse Browning strikes the old 
 chords with a virile touch which evokes no uncer- 
 tain sound. He pictures the Fates couched dragon- 
 wise in the heart of night, casting over the upper 
 world a darkness as impenetrable as that in which 
 they measure and cut the threads of existence, and 
 summing up life in words that seem, save for their 
 vigor, borrowed from some of our minor singers : 
 
A TEXT FROM SIDNEY. 77 
 
 " What's in fancy? Ignorance, idleness, mischief : 
 Youth ripens to arrogance, foolishness, greed : 
 Age — impotence, churlishness, rancor." 
 
 Into this chamber of blackness descends Apollo, and 
 straightway a supernal light breaks on the three 
 terrible sisters, which they cannot dim by a torrent 
 of fateful words. The shining God thrusts heaven 
 upon them : 
 
 " Regard how your cavern from crag-tip to base 
 
 Frowns sheer, height and depth adamantine, one death ! 
 I rouse with a beam the whole rampart, displace 
 
 No splinter — yet see how my flambeau, beneath 
 And above, bids this gem wink, that crystal unsheathe." 
 
 This is the divine office of that Imagination of 
 which Apollo will always remain the noblest symbol 
 and the most significant creation. The fancy, deli- 
 cate it may be as the flush on a rose or the sculp- 
 tured line on a Grecian urn, can never take the 
 place of that highest reason by which alone the ulti- 
 mate truths are reached and the secrets of life re- 
 vealed. The "idle singer of an empty day," the 
 doubting, hesitant singer, uncertain of his song, can 
 never touch the heart of humanity, nor make it one 
 with the world about it. The true poet is still the 
 interpreter of the gods. "Thou true land-lord! 
 sea-lord ! air-lord ! Wherever snow falls or water 
 flows or birds fly, wherever day and night meet in 
 twilight, wherever the blue heaven is hung by clouds 
 or sown with stars, wherever are forms with tran- 
 
7 8 MY STUDY FIRE. 
 
 sparent boundaries, wherever are outlets into celes- 
 tial space, wherever is danger, and awe, and love — 
 there is Beauty, plenteous as rain, shed for thee, 
 and though thou shouldst walk the world over, thou 
 shalt not be able to find a condition inopportune or 
 ignoble." 
 
CHAPTER XII. 
 
 THE ARTIST TALKS. 
 
 Last night we sat late over the fire. It had been 
 a blustering day, but at sunset the wind fell and the 
 stars came out in splendid brilliancy. Rosalind had 
 taken up her work, and we were anticipating a long, 
 quiet evening, when the door opened and our friend 
 the artist walked abruptly in. Without ceremony, 
 he dropped his hat and coat on a chair, and almost 
 before we realized that he was in the house he was 
 standing before the fire warming his hands and saying 
 that it was an uncommonly sharp night. No more 
 welcome guest ever comes under our roof than the 
 artist. Slender, alert, restless, speaking always the 
 thought that is uppermost in his mind without refer- 
 ence to persons or places, I do not know a more 
 genuine, keensighted, and aspiring human soul. I 
 looked at him for a moment almost with curiosity ; 
 so rare is the sight of a man working out his life 
 with eager joy and in entire unconsciousness of him- 
 self. His fellow-craftsmen are all talking about his 
 extraordinary work, and the world is fast finding 
 him out ; but he remains as simple-hearted as a 
 child. It is this quality quite as much as the genius 
 for expression which I find in him which assures me 
 that he has the elements of greatness. When he 
 begins to talk, we are always glad to remain silent ; 
 79 
 
80 MY STUDY FIRE. 
 
 such speech as his is rare. A fresher, clearer, more 
 original talker never comes into the Study; his 
 thought flashes to the very heart of the theme, and 
 we see it instantly in some fresh and striking aspect or 
 relation. He is so far removed from the atmosphere 
 of the materialistic spirit that he is as untouched 
 and untainted by it as if it did not exist. Life 
 grows rich under his speech; becomes splendid with 
 interior truth and beauty; becomes marvelously 
 suggestive and inspiring. The commercial stand- 
 point and standards do not enter into his conception 
 of life and the world; the conventional estimates and 
 judgments do not lay a feather's weight on his alert, 
 aspiring spirit. The other day I met him coming 
 away from a rehearsal at which a famous pianist 
 had so thrilled a great audience that the applause 
 more than once broke in on the music. "That man 
 is an artist," said my friend; "did you notice how 
 the crowd irritated him? He hated us because we 
 made him conscious of our presence." 
 
 It happened that yesterday Rosalind and I had 
 been looking at an etching of Meryon's, and we had 
 naturally fallen to talking about the pathos of his 
 life ; a man of exquisite genius, every touch of whose 
 hand is now precious, but who lived without recog- 
 nition and died without hope. And as I had seen 
 recently some account of the enormous aggregate 
 value of Corot's works, I recalled also the long years 
 of indifference and neglect through which the great 
 artist waited and worked before fame entered his 
 
THE ARTIST TALKS. »l 
 
 atelier. When we were comfortably disposed before 
 the fire, and the talk, breaking free from personal 
 incident, began to flow in its accustomed channels, 
 both Meryon and Corot were mentioned by Rosa- 
 lind as illustrations of the struggle with the world 
 to which some of the greatest souls are subjected ; 
 and she added that it was hard to reconcile one's 
 self to the swift success which often comes to lesser 
 men while their superiors are fighting the battle with 
 want and neglect. 
 
 "Don't bother about that," said our friend, start- 
 ing out of his chair and standing before the fire. 
 "There is nothing that a real artist cares less for 
 than what you call success. It is generally a mis- 
 fortune if he gets it early, and if it comes to him 
 late he is indifferent to it. It is a misfortune when 
 a man really wants bread and butter and can't get 
 it ; when a man is so straitened that he cannot work 
 in peace; but that does not often happen. Most 
 men earn enough to fill their mouths and cover their 
 backs ; if they earn more, it generally means that 
 they are throwing away their chances ; that the devil 
 of popularity has got their ear and is buying them 
 piecemeal. Neglect and indifference are things 
 which a man ought to pray for, not things to be 
 shunned while one lives and lamented after one is 
 dead. Neglect and indifference mean freedom from 
 temptation, long, quiet days in one's studio, hard 
 work, sound sleep, and healthy growth. It was a 
 great piece of luck for Corot that the world was so 
 6 
 
82 MY STUDY FIRE. 
 
 long in finding him; that it left him so many years 
 in peace to do his work and let his soul out. His 
 contempt for popularity was well expressed in the 
 phrase, 'Men are like flies; if one alights on a dish, 
 others will follow.' No happier man ever lived 
 than Corot during those years when there was noth- 
 ing to do but sit in the fields, pipe in mouth, and 
 watch the morning sky, and then go and paint it. 
 As for Meryon, his case was a hard one ; but there 
 was madness in his blood, and, after all, he had the 
 supreme satisfaction of saying his say. He put him- 
 self on his plates, and that was enough for any man. 
 "People are so stupid about this matter of suc- 
 cess," he continued, walking up and down the 
 room. "They seem to think a man is miserable 
 unless they crowd his studio. For my part, I don't 
 want them there. Don't you understand that all 
 an artist asks is a chance to work? What we want 
 is not success, but the chance to get ourselves on to 
 canvas. I paint because I can't help it ; I am tor- 
 tured with thirst for expression. Give me expres- 
 sion, and I am happy ; deny it, and I am miserable. ' ' 
 Here a copy of Keats caught his eye. "It is the 
 same with all of us; there was never a greater mis- 
 take than the idea that Keats was unhappy because 
 critics fell foul of him and the people didn't read 
 him. It is natural to wish that people would see 
 things as we see them, but the chief thing is that 
 we see them ourselves. Keats didn't write for the 
 crowd; he wrote for himself. There was a pain 
 
THE ARTIST TALKS. 83 
 
 in his soul that could only be eased by writing. 
 When a man writes an 'Ode to a Grecian Urn,' 
 he doesn't need to be told that he is successful. 
 They talk about Shakespeare's indifference to fame 
 as if it were the sign of a small nature which could 
 not recognize its own greatness. Can't they see 
 that Shakespeare wrote to free his own mind and 
 heart? that before he wrote either play he had con- 
 quered in himself the weakness of Hamlet on the 
 one hand, and the weakness of Romeo on the other? 
 Never was a man more fortunate than Shakespeare, 
 for he wrote himself entirely out; he completely 
 expressed himself. I can imagine him turning his 
 back on London and settling down to his small con- 
 cerns at Stratford with supreme content. What 
 can the world give to or take from the man who 
 has lived his life and put the whole of it into art? 
 I understand that everybody is reading Browning 
 nowadays; I am surprised they waited so long. I 
 discovered him long ago, and have fed on him ever 
 since, because I felt the eager longing for life and 
 the quenchless thirst for expression in him. No 
 English poet has said such true things about art, 
 because no one else has understood so thoroughly 
 an artist's hunger and thirst, and the things that 
 give him peace." Just at this point, when I was 
 getting into a talking mood myself, our friend 
 stopped suddenly, declared that he had forgotten 
 an engagement, seized his hat and coat, and made 
 off after his customary abrupt fashion. 
 
CHAPTER XIII. 
 
 ESCAPING FROM BONDAGE. 
 
 I have often pictured to myself the scene in the 
 old Tower when Raleigh broke the spell of prison 
 life by writing the history of the world. The rest- 
 less prisoner, a born leader and man of affairs, 
 whose ambitious projects were spread over two conti- 
 nents, was suddenly secluded from the life of his 
 time at the hour when that life had for every daring 
 spirit an irresistible attraction. On the instant this 
 audacious courtier of fortune, ready to take advan- 
 tage of any wind and strike for any prize, was locked 
 and bolted in the solitude of a cell! Such a man 
 must find vent for his arrested energies, or prey upon 
 himself. If Raleigh could not go to the world, the 
 world must come to him! And it came, -not to 
 scorn and triumph over him, but to submit to the 
 calm scrutiny of his active mind. There have been 
 more striking examples of the victory of a soul over 
 its surroundings; Epictetus made himself free 
 though a slave, and Marcus Aurelius learned how 
 to serve though an emperor; but there has been 
 no more dramatic illustration of the victorious asser- 
 tion of personality. 
 
 The limitations of most lives are by no means so 
 84 
 
ESCAPING FROM BONDAGE. ?5 
 
 tangible as the walls within which Raleigh was con- 
 fined, but there is a certain amount of restriction 
 laid on us all. We are all prisoners in some sense; 
 the great man who, of all others, demonstrated most 
 sublimely the superiority of the soul over all exter- 
 nal conditions, described himself as "a prisoner of 
 hope." There are fixed limits to the activity of 
 even the freest life ; and for many, a narrow field 
 is set both for happiness and for work. There is 
 one place, however, where no boundaries are fixed, 
 no doors closed, no bolts shot: among his books a 
 man laughs at his bonds and finds an open road out 
 of every form of imprisonment. Last night Rosa- 
 lind read to me, from Silvio Pellico's Memoirs, pic- 
 tures of his prison life. His very bondage had fur- 
 nished material for his pen ; out of the barrenness 
 of his prisons he had gathered a harvest of experi- 
 ence and thought. There is no kind of bondage 
 which life lays upon us that may not yield both 
 sweetness and strength, and nothing reveals a man's 
 character more fully than the spirit in which he 
 bears his limitations. 
 
 It is an easy matter for the man of many burdens 
 and of sharp restrictions of duty and opportunity to 
 become envious, to rail at fate, and to decry the 
 fortune and work of those who are better circum- 
 stanced. It is very easy for such a man to shut his 
 mind and heart within the same walls which confine 
 his body, and to become narrow, hard, and unsym- 
 pathetic. There are hosts of men who impose their 
 
86 MY STUDY FIRE. 
 
 own limitations on the world and set up their own 
 narrowness as the standard of virtue ; who identify 
 their own small conceptions of time and eternity 
 with a divine revelation of truth and pronounce all 
 who differ from them anathema. There are few 
 spectacles more common or more pitiful than these 
 strange illusions by which men mistake their little- 
 ness for greatness and the narrow boundaries of 
 their own thoughts and feelings for the outermost 
 bounds and sheer edge of the universe. To be in 
 prison and not be conscious of the bondage is surely 
 a tragic comment on one's ideal of freedom. 
 
 We are all shut up within intangible walls of 
 ignorance, prejudice, half-knowledge; and the dif- 
 erence between men is not the difference between 
 those who are in bonds and those who are free, but 
 between those who feel their bondage and are striv- 
 ing for freedom, and those who, being bound, think 
 themselves loose. The long story of the struggles 
 and agonies and achievements of men is the story 
 of the unbroken effort for freedom; it is the record 
 of countless attempts to break jail and live under 
 God's clear heavens. Hegel declared that the great 
 fact of history is the struggle for freedom, and 
 Matthew Arnold reaffirmed the same thing when he 
 said again and again that the instinct for expansion 
 is at the bottom of the movement of civilization. It 
 is this heroic endeavor, often futile, often defeated, 
 but never abandoned, which gives history its dignity 
 and its thrilling interest. 
 
ESCAPING FROM BONDAGE. 87 
 
 Of the spiritual and intellectual struggles toward 
 light and freedom literature gives the fullest and 
 most authentic account. Great writers have always 
 been in advance of their time, and the impulse to- 
 ward expression has come largely from the inspira- 
 tion of escape from some bondage in which other 
 men are held. From Socrates to Browning, the 
 thinkers and poets have all been emancipators. In 
 .the end this bringing of new light into the mind of 
 the world will be counted their chief service. 
 "When I am dead," said one of the keenest of 
 modern minds, one of the greatest of modern 
 poets, "lay a sword on my coffin, for I was a sol- 
 dier in the war for the liberation of humanity." 
 Like service has been rendered by almost all the 
 great writers. They have seen beyond their time ; 
 they have parted company with some usage, some 
 tradition out of which the life had ebbed ; they 
 have broken away from some decaying creed; they 
 have put some new knowledge in the place of some 
 old ignorance. The steady movement of great 
 literature is toward the light; and there are few 
 instrumentalities so potent to destroy provincialism, 
 to dissipate popular misconceptions, and to substi- 
 tute for parochial standards and ideas the larger 
 thought of the larger world of open-minded men. 
 Literature is the hereditary enemy of half-truths, of 
 false perspectives in looking at life, of partial esti- 
 mates in dealing with men. No man can open his 
 mind to the spirit and teaching of the greatest minds 
 
88 MY STUDY FIRE. 
 
 without suffering an enlargement of vision. A man 
 can remain small in a library only by refusing the 
 noble fellowship which lies within his reach; he 
 cannot have companionship with inspiring per- 
 sons and escape some share in their nobler vision 
 of life. 
 
CHAPTER XIV. 
 
 SOME OLD SCHOLARS. 
 
 The study door is rarely closed. For the most 
 part, it stands open to those vague and wandering 
 sounds which rather serve to convey a sense of com- 
 panionship than to interrupt thought and dissipate 
 interest. The deepest studies sometimes miss their 
 best results because they are too solitary. The 
 scholar must keep out of the bustle of active life ; 
 but if he cross the line of sympathy, if he lose touch 
 with his day and his fellows, there is an end of his 
 usefulness. Nothing interprets a great book or a 
 great picture like human life ; it is the only com- 
 mentary on the growth of art which is worth study- 
 ing, for in it alone are to be found the secrets and 
 the meaning of art. The scholar must always be 
 in the best sense a man of the world : one by whom 
 the faces and souls of men are daily read with the 
 insight of sympathy ; one to whom the great move- 
 ment of humanity is the supreme fact to be felt, to 
 be studied, to be interpreted. It is this vital rela- 
 tion to his own age which distinguishes the scholar 
 from the pedant — the man to whom the heart of 
 knowledge reveals itself from the man whose fellow- 
 
9° MY STUDY FIRE. 
 
 ship with the past is always only "dust to dust, 
 ashes to ashes." 
 
 It was just this vitality, this living relation to 
 living things, which separated the first great modern 
 scholar from the generations of forgotten Dry-as- 
 Dusts who preceded him. Petrarch really escaped 
 from a sepulcher when he stepped out of the cloister 
 of medievalism, with its crucifix, its pictures of un- 
 healthy saints, its cords of self-flagellation, and 
 found the heavens clear, beautiful, and well worth 
 living under, and the world full of good things 
 which one might desire and yet not be given over to 
 evil. He ventured to look at life for himself, and 
 he found it full of wonderful power and dignity. 
 He opened his Virgil, brushed aside the cobwebs 
 which monkish brains had spun over the beautiful 
 lines, and met the old poet as one man meets 
 another; and, lo ! there rose before him a new, un- 
 trodden, and wholly human world, free from priest- 
 craft and pedantry, near to nature, and unspeakably 
 alluring and satisfying. Digging down through a 
 vast overgrowth of superstition and pedantry, Pe- 
 trarch found the real soil of life once more, and 
 found that antiquity had its roots there quite as 
 much as medievalism ; that the Greeks and Rom- 
 ans were flesh and blood quite as truly as the image- 
 worshiping Italians. Then came the inevitable 
 thought that these men were not outcasts from the 
 grace and care of heaven, "dead and damned 
 heathen," whose civilization had been a mere worth- 
 
SOME OLD SCHOLARS. 91 
 
 less husk to protect the later Christian society, but 
 that they belonged in the divinely appointed order 
 of history, had lived their lives and done their work 
 and gone to their rest as the later generations were 
 doing. The moment Petrarch understood these 
 very simple but then very radical truths his whole 
 attitude toward the past was changed ; it was no 
 longer a forbidden country, but a fresh, untrodden 
 world, rich in all manner of noble activities and ex- 
 periences, full of character, significance, divinity. 
 There is no need to recall the mighty stirrings of 
 soul that followed ; in Humanism the mind had 
 come into fresh contact with life and received a new 
 and overmastering impulse. The new learning ran 
 like fire over Italy ; old men forsook their vices for 
 the charms of scholarship, young men exchanged 
 their pleasures for the garb and habits of the student; 
 the air was charged with the electricity of new 
 thought, and all minds turned to the future with a 
 prophetic sense of the great new age on whose 
 threshold they stood. 
 
 It was inevitable that in the course of time Hu- 
 manism itself should become pedantic and formal, 
 should lose its hold upon the turbulent and restless 
 life about it, and should finally give place to a later 
 and still more vital scholarship. Nothing pauses in 
 the sublime evolution of history ; there is no place of 
 rest in that pilgrimage which is an eternal truth seek- 
 ing. It would be interesting to trace the inner 
 history of the learning which Petrarch and Boccac- 
 
92 MY STUDY FIRE. 
 
 cio and the men of the great Italian Revival carried 
 through Europe, and to meet here and there some 
 large-minded, noble-hearted scholar, standing book 
 in hand, but always with the windows of his chamber 
 open to the fields and woods, always with the doors 
 of his life open to human need and fellowship. For 
 true scholarship never dies; the fire sometimes 
 passes from one to another in the hollow of a reed, 
 as in the earliest time, but it never goes out. I con- 
 fess that I can never read quite unmoved the story of 
 the Brethern of the Common Life, those humble- 
 minded, patient teachers and thinkers whose devo- 
 tion and fire of soul for a century and a half made 
 the choice treasures of Italian palaces and convents 
 and universities a common possession along the low- 
 lying shores of the Netherlands. The asceticism 
 of this noble brotherhood was no morbid and divi- 
 sive fanaticism ; it was a denial of themselves that 
 they might have the more to give. The visions 
 which touched at times the bare walls of their cells 
 with supernal beauty only made them the more 
 eager to share their heaven of privilege with the 
 sorely burdened world without. Surely Virgil and 
 Horace and the other masters of classic form were 
 never more honored than when these noble-minded 
 lovers of learning and of their kind made their sound- 
 ing lines familiar in peasant homes. Among the 
 great folios of the fifteenth century, the very titles 
 of which the modern scholar no longer burdens his 
 memory with, there is one little volume which the 
 
SOME OLD SCHOLARS. 93 
 
 world has known by heart these four hundred years 
 and more. Its bulk is so small that one may carry 
 it in his pocket, but its depth of feeling is so great 
 that one never gets quite to the bottom of it, and 
 its outlook is so sublime that one never sees quite 
 to the end of it. The great folios are monuments 
 of patience and imperfect information ; this little 
 volume is instinct with human life; a soul speaks 
 to souls in it. It was by no caprice of nature that 
 the "De Imitatione Christi" was written by a mem- 
 ber of the Brotherhood of the Common Life. And 
 when the great hour of deliverance from priestcraft 
 for Germany and Northern Europe came, it was no 
 accident that made another member of the same 
 order the fellow-worker with Luther for liberty of 
 thought. Erasmus was no reformer, but he was a 
 true scholar, and in the splendor of his great attain- 
 ments and the importance of his great service the 
 obscure virtues of the Brotherhood of the Common 
 Life receive a final and perpetual illumination. 
 
 In Kaulbach's striking cartoon of the Reforma- 
 tion there is one figure which no one overlooks, 
 although Shakespeare and Michael Angelo stand in 
 full view. Among the masters of art and literature 
 the cobbler, with his leather apron, finds a place by 
 right of possession which no one of his compeers 
 would dispute. The six thousand compositions of 
 Hans Sachs are for the most part forgotten, with 
 the innumerable poems of the Minnesingers and 
 Meistersingers, but there remain a few verses which 
 
94 MY STUDY FIRE. 
 
 the world will not care to forget. In spite of the 
 roughness of his verse, its unmelodious movement, 
 its lack of musical cadence and accent, the cobbler 
 of Niirnberg lived in the life of his time ; he had 
 eyes that looked upon the skies and fields, and a 
 heart that was one with the hearts of his people. It 
 was this vital perception that saved him from slavery 
 to the mechanism of verse and made him a poet in 
 spite of his time and himself. A genuine scholar, 
 and yet a man of the people, Hans Sachs lifts him- 
 self out of the mechanical pedantry of his age by 
 the freshness of his contact with life. He might 
 truly have said of himself, as he has said of another : 
 
 " But he — I say with sorrow — 
 Is a wretched singer thorough, 
 Who all his songs must borrow 
 From what was sung before." 
 
 No man can live in a "Palace of Art" without 
 danger of missing, not only his own highest develop- 
 ment, but that heritage of truth which is always a 
 common and never a personal possession. The 
 poet who separates himself from his fellows repro- 
 duces himself by a law which holds him powerless 
 in its grasp ; the poet who lives richly and deeply 
 with his kind learns the secrets of all hearts, and, 
 like Shakespeare, sees the endless procession of 
 humanity passing as he looks into his own soul. 
 The scholar masters the letter and misses the spirit 
 as he sits in unbroken seclusion among his books ; 
 the light of common love and joy and sorrow which 
 
SOME OLD SCHOLARS. 95 
 
 alone penetrates knowledge to its heart and suffuses 
 bare statement with the soul of truth fades from the 
 page utterly. And so the study door stands open, 
 and intermingling with the great thoughts of the 
 past there comes the sound of voices that break the 
 solitude of life with hope and faith and love, and 
 the rush of little feet that transform it with that 
 thought of eternal youth which is only another word 
 for immortality. 
 
CHAPTER XV. 
 
 DULL DAYS. 
 
 It is a day of mist and rain ; a day without light or 
 color. The leaden sky rests heavily, almost oppres- 
 sively, on the earth ; the monotonous dropping of 
 the rain sets the gray dreariness of the day to a 
 slow, unvarying rhythm. On such a day nature 
 seems wrapped in an inaccessible mood, and one 
 gets no help from her. On such a day it not unfre- 
 quently happens that one's spirits take on the color 
 of the world, and not a flower blooms, not a bird 
 sings, in the garden of the imagination. If one 
 yields to the mood, he puts on the hair shirt of the 
 penitent, and spends the long hours in recalling his 
 sins and calculating the sum total of his mistakes. 
 If one is candid and sensitive, the hours as they pass 
 steadily add to the balance on the debit side of the 
 account, and long ere the night comes bankruptcy 
 has been reached and accepted as a just award of an 
 ill-spent life. Everybody who has any imagination, 
 and suffers lapses from a good 'physical condition, 
 knows these gray days and dreads them as visitors 
 who enter without the formality of knocking, and 
 who linger long after the slender welcome which gave 
 them unwilling recognition has been worn thread- 
 Q 6 
 
DULL DAYS. 97 
 
 bare. One cannot wholly get away from the weather 
 even if his mind be of the sanest and his body of 
 the soundest ; we are too much involved in the 
 general order of things not to be more or less sym- 
 pathetic with the atmosphere and sky. There are 
 days when one must make a strenuous effort to be 
 less than gay ; there are days when one must make 
 an equally strenuous effort to preserve the bare 
 appearance of cheerfulness. 
 
 And yet no man need be the slave of the day ; he 
 may escape out of it into the broad spaces of the 
 years, into the vastness of the centuries. There is 
 every kind of weather in books, and on such a day 
 as this one has but to make his choice of climate, 
 season, and sky. Stirring the fire until it throws a 
 ruddy glow on the windows where the melancholy 
 day weeps in monotonous despair, I may open The- 
 ocritus, and what to me are the fogs and mists of 
 March on the Atlantic coast? I am in Sicily, and 
 the olive and pine are green, sky and sea meet in a 
 line so blue that I know not whether it be water or 
 atmosphere; the cicada whirs; the birds stir in the 
 little wood; and from the distance come the notes 
 of the shepherd's pipe. All this is mine if I choose 
 to stretch out my hand and open a little book — all 
 this and a hundred other shining skies north and 
 south, east and west. I need not spend a minute 
 with this March day if I choose to open any one of 
 these countless doors of escape. I know the roads 
 well, for I have often taken them when such mists as 
 7 
 
9 8 MY STUDY FIRE. 
 
 these that lie upon the woods and meadows have 
 pressed too closely on my spirits. 
 
 But there is something to be learned from a dull 
 day, and the wiser part is to stay and con the lesson. 
 He who knows only brilliant skies has still to know 
 some of the profoundest aspects behind which nature 
 conceals herself. Corot's morning skies stir the 
 imagination to its very depths ; but so also do those 
 noble etchings of Van Gravesande which report 
 the blackness of night and storm about the light- 
 house and the somber mystery of the deep woods. 
 
 A dull day need not be a depressing day ; depres- 
 sion always implies physical or moral weakness, and 
 is, therefore, never to be tolerated so long as one 
 can struggle against it. But a dull day — a day with- 
 out deep emotions, inspiring thought, marked 
 events; a day monotonous and colorless; a day 
 which proclaims itself neutral among all the con- 
 flicting interests of life, is a day to be valued. Such 
 a day is recuperative, sedative, reposeful. It gives 
 emotion opportunity to accumulate volume and 
 force, thought time to clarify and review its con- 
 clusions, the senses that inaction which freshens 
 them for clearer perceptions and keener enjoy- 
 ments. A dull day is often the mother of many 
 bright days. It is easy to surrender one's self to 
 the better mood of such a day; to accept its repose 
 and reject its gloom. As the hours pass one finds 
 himself gently released from the tension of the work 
 which had begun to haunt his dreams, quietly 
 
DULL DAYS. 99 
 
 detached from places and persons associated with 
 the discipline and responsibility of daily occupation. 
 The steady dropping of the rain soothes and calms 
 the restlessness of a mind grown too fixed upon its 
 daily task; the low-lying mists aid the illusion that 
 the world beyond is a dream, and that the only 
 reality is here within these cheerful walls. After 
 a time this passive enjoyment becomes active, this 
 negative pleasure takes on a positive form. There is 
 something pleasant in the beat of the storm, some- 
 thing agreeable in the colorless landscape. One 
 has gotten rid of his every-day self, and gotten into 
 the mood of a day which discountenances great 
 enterprises and sustained endeavors of every kind. 
 One stirs the fire with infinite satisfaction, and 
 coddles himself in the cozy contrast between the 
 cheerfulness within and the gloom without. One 
 wanders from window to window, lounges in every 
 easy chair, gives himself up to dreams which come 
 and go without order or coherence, as if the mind 
 had given itself up to play. Pleasant places and 
 faces reappear from a past into which they had been 
 somewhat rudely pressed by a present too busy to 
 concern itself with memories ; old plans reform 
 themselves, old purposes and hopes are revived; 
 the works one meant to accomplish and abandoned 
 by the way disclose new possibilities of realization. 
 When the afternoon begins to darken, one finds 
 that he has gathered from the past many fragments 
 that promise to find completion in some new and 
 
ioo MY STUDY FIRE. 
 
 sounder form. It has been a day of gleaning, if not 
 of harvesting. As the night descends, fresh fuel 
 renews the smoldering flame, and the past, so quietly, 
 almost unconsciously, recalled, projects itself into 
 the future, and stirs the imagination with a hope 
 that to-morrow may become a purpose, and the day 
 after an achievement. 
 
CHAPTER XVI. 
 
 THE UNIVERSAL BIOGRAPHY. 
 
 All day long the snow has been whirling over 
 the fields in shapes so varied and so elusive that I 
 have fancied myself present at a dance of phan- 
 toms — wandering ghosts of dead seasons haunting 
 the fields which once spread out sunlighted and 
 fragrant before them. At intervals the sun has 
 pierced the clouds and touched the earth with a 
 dazzling brilliancy, but for the most part the winds 
 have driven the storm before them, and at times 
 wrapped all visible things in a white mist of obscurity. 
 On such a day the open fire lights the open book 
 with a glow of peculiar cheer and friendliness; it 
 seems to search out whatever of human warmth lies 
 at the root of a man's thought, and to kindle it with 
 a kindred heat. On such a day the companionable 
 quality of a book discovers itself as at no other 
 time; it seems to take advantage of the absence of 
 nature to exert its own peculiar charm. In summer 
 the vast and inexhaustible life of nature, audible at 
 every hour and present at every turn of thought, 
 makes most books pallid and meager. In the uni- 
 versal light which streams over the earth all lights 
 of man's making seem artificial, unreal, and out of 
 
102 MY STUDY FIRE. 
 
 place. There are days in summer when the best 
 book affects one as a stage set for the play in broad 
 daylight. But when the days are shortened, and 
 darkness lies on half the dial-plate, the life that is 
 in books takes heart again and boldly claims com- 
 panionship with the noblest minds. 
 
 As I look out of my window I recognize scarcely 
 a feature of last summer's landscape, so universal 
 and so illusive is the transformation which the snow 
 has wrought. It is a veritable new world which 
 stretches away, white, and silent, toward the hori- 
 zon. But this change is not greater than that of 
 which I am conscious as I look within and follow 
 the lines of my books around the walls. These 
 wear a new aspect, and one that appeals to me with 
 a subtle sense of fellowship. Last summer we were 
 casual acquaintances ; to-day we are intimate and 
 inseparable friends. It is not only true that there 
 is always a man back of a book, but in every book 
 there is always a part of one's self. The greater a 
 book is, the more familiar it is; we do not stop to 
 weigh its affirmations and conclusions ; we have 
 always known them to be true. A chapter of scien- 
 tific investigation, a page in a book of mere infor- 
 mation, will challenge our criticism and arouse our 
 antagonism ; but a book of power, a book which 
 records the dropping of the lead into some fathom- 
 less pool of consciousness, commands our assent at 
 once ; it simply expresses what we have always 
 known. In summer, nature spreads all manner of 
 
THE UNIVERSAL BIOGRAPHY. 1 03 
 
 nets to beguile us out of ourselves; but when the fires 
 sing to us, their cheerful monotone becomes a softly 
 touched accompaniment to our introspection. The 
 golden milestone in the Roman Forum, from which 
 one could begin his journey to the four quarters of 
 the globe, has its analogue in every man's soul ; into 
 whatever part of the universe he would travel, he 
 must start from his own personal consciousness. 
 Our thoughts make highways of the courses which 
 they habitually take when we leave them to them- 
 selves, and footpaths along which they loiter when 
 fancy beguiles them unawares into her companion- 
 ship. But, however the journey be undertaken, or 
 to whatever quarter it tend, thought always starts 
 from and returns to one's self. It is through our 
 own consciousness that we penetrate the secrets of 
 other experiences and interpret the mystery of the 
 universe. 
 
 There is a sense, therefore, in which all the great 
 books are chapters out of our personal history. 
 We read them with a certain sense of ownership ; 
 the feeling of a man who comes upon a mechanical 
 device which he long ago hit upon, but never took 
 the trouble to protect by patent. We can never be 
 surprised by any revelation of life or character, be- 
 cause we carry every possible development of these 
 within the invisible realm of our own consciousness. 
 Marlowe's "Tamburlaine" fills us with no astonish- 
 ment, and the story of the latest hero who died for 
 imperiled humanity stirs our pulses mainly because 
 
104 MY STUDY FIRE. 
 
 the swift crisis appeals to our nobility as it appealed 
 to his. How often we chance upon books that 
 seem to be literal transcriptions of our own experi- 
 ences ! It fills us with a sense of discomfort that 
 we should be so well known, that the curtain should 
 have been lifted so ruthlessly upon a past which we 
 were striving to forget. It is this common con- 
 sciousness, this participation in a common memory, 
 which keeps us within call of each other in all the 
 great crises of life, and makes our libraries places 
 of confession and penitence. In the world's cathe- 
 dral at Rome there are confessionals to whose im- 
 personal sympathy appeals may be made in every 
 language spoken by civilized men; but every library 
 is a truer confessional, and a more universal, than 
 St. Peter's. The dome which overarches every 
 collection of great books is nothing less than the 
 infinite sky which stretches over the life of man, and 
 no human soul ever failed to find there the shrine 
 of its own tutelary saint. Literature keeps the 
 whole race under constant conviction of sin, and 
 there are hours when every man feels like locking 
 his study door, so absolutely uncovered and revealed 
 does his life lie in the speech of some great book. 
 
 Shakespeare knew us all so well that one feels the 
 uselessness of any attempt at concealment in his 
 presence; those penetrating eyes make all disguise 
 impossible. He takes little account of our mas- 
 querade, except to sharpen the edge of his irony by 
 a contrast between our pretension and the bare facts 
 
THE UNIVERSAL BIOGRAPHY. 105 
 
 of our lives. And this revelation of our inner selves 
 is the core of every book that endures. It is already 
 clear that all the systems of philosophy have had 
 their day, and are fast ceasing to be ; and there is 
 every prospect that the scholastic systems of theology 
 are going the same road. The facts of life — di- 
 vine and human — transcend them all, and their 
 poverty and inadequacy are more and more appa- 
 rent. The universe is too vast for the girdle of 
 thought ; it sweeps away immeasurably, and fades 
 out of imagination in the splendor of uncounted 
 suns. There will be safe paths of knowledge 
 through it for men of reverence and humility, but 
 the old highway of human omniscience is falling 
 into decay. The utmost service of the greatest man 
 is to bring us one step nearer to the truth, not as it 
 lies clear and absolute in the mind of the Infinite, 
 but as it touches, reveals, and sustains this brief and 
 troubled life of ours. Therefore it has been that 
 the poets have done more for the highest truth than 
 the philosophers, unless the philosophers have also 
 been poets, as has happened now and then since the 
 days of Plato. One turns oftener for inspiration to 
 Wordsworth's ode on "Immortality," or to Brown- 
 ing's "Death in the Desert" or "Saul," than to 
 Kant's "Critique of Pure Reason" or Spencer's 
 "First Principles." 
 
 When I go into the great libraries I am oppressed, 
 not by the mass of volumes packed together under 
 a single roof, but by the complexity and vastness of 
 
106 MY STUDY FIRE. 
 
 the life that lies behind them. Books by the hun- 
 dred thousand have been written to give that life 
 expression, and yet how little has been said that 
 goes to the very heart of existence! When one has 
 read the great books in all literatures, how much 
 still remains unuttered within him ! 
 
CHAPTER XVII. 
 
 A SECRET OF GENIUS. 
 
 One of the tests of. greatness is bulk. Mere mass 
 never demonstrated the possession of genius, but 
 men who have borne the stamp of this rare and 
 incommunicable quality have generally been creators 
 on a great scale. One may write a single poem 
 and give it the touch of immortality ; a line may 
 linger as long in the ear of the world as an epic or a 
 lyric. But, as a rule, the man who writes one perfect 
 verse adds to it many of a kindred beauty, and he 
 who paints one great picture covers the walls of the 
 gallery. Genius is energy quite as much as insight, 
 and whether it dwell in Shakespeare or in Napoleon, 
 in Michael Angelo or in Gladstone, it is always the 
 mother of mighty works as well as of great thoughts. 
 Shakespeare, Goethe, Lope de Vega, Moliere, 
 Tennyson, Browning, Hugo, Balzac, Scott, Thack- 
 eray, fill great space on the shelves of our libraries 
 as well as in our histories of literature. In "Louis 
 Lambert" Balzac describes certain forces, when 
 they take possession of strong personalities, as 
 "rivers of will" ; there is an impetus in these poten- 
 tial men which sweeps away all obstacles and rolls 
 on with the momentum of a great stream. In men of 
 genius the same tireless activity, the same forceful 
 habit, are often found; nothing daunts them; noth- 
 107 
 
io8 MY STUDY FIRE. 
 
 ing subdues them ; they make all things tributary 
 to self-expression. 
 
 The story of the achievements of Lope de Vega, 
 of Scott, of Balzac, has at times a hint of commerce 
 with magical powers ; so difficult is it to reconcile 
 such marvelous fecundity, such extraordinary crea- 
 tive force, with the usual processes of production. 
 Nature has fixed definite boundaries to the activity 
 of most men ; there is an invisible line beyond which 
 they seem powerless to go. Upon the man of 
 genius no such limitations are imposed; if he drains 
 his soul, it is instantly refilled from some invisible 
 fountain. There is something magical about "such 
 an achievement as the writing of the "Comedie 
 Humaine," with its eighty and more volumes and its 
 vast community of characters. The physical feat of 
 covering so much paper is no small matter; one 
 does not wonder that Balzac retired to his work- 
 shop with an unwritten romance in his mind and 
 returned with the completed work, worn, exhausted, 
 almost emaciated. Such labors cannot be accom- 
 plished save by fasting and self-denial. More than 
 two thousand personalities live and move and have 
 their being in the "Comedie Humaine," and each 
 is carefully studied, vividly realized, firmly drawn. 
 In no actual community of the same number of 
 souls is there anything approaching the distinctness 
 of individuality, the variety and force of character, 
 to be found in these volumes. Pioneers build 
 houses, subdue forests, develop wastes. Balzac did 
 
A SECRET OF GENIUS. 109 
 
 more ; he fashioned a world and peopled it. All 
 passions, appetites, aspirations, despairs, hopes, 
 losses, labors, sufferings, achievements, were known 
 to him; he had mastered them, and he used them 
 as if they were to serve no other purpose than that 
 of furnishing material for his hand. To have looked 
 into the depths of human life with so wide and 
 penetrating a gaze ; to have breathed a soul into 
 these abstract qualities; to have clothed them with 
 the habits, mauners, characteristics, dress, social 
 surroundings, of actual beings; to have lodged 
 them in country and city — is there any fairy tale so 
 wonderful, any miracle wrought by genie or magi- 
 cian so bewildering? Here, surely, are the evidences 
 of the flow of one of those rivers of will which have 
 more than once transformed society. 
 
 One of the secrets of this marvelous fecundity is to ^ 
 keep one's self in the mood and atmosphere in which 
 imagination and heart work as one harmonious and 
 continuous energy. There is an element of inspira- < 
 tion in all great work which is never wholly at com- 
 mand; with the greatest as with humbler men, it ebbs 
 and flows. There are times when it comes in with the 
 rush of the flood; when the mind is suddenly ferti- 
 lized with ideas ; when the heart is "a nest of sing- 
 ing birds," when the whole visible world shines and 
 glows. There are times, also, when its ebb leaves 
 mind and heart as bare and vacant as the beach 
 from which the tide has receded. These alterna- 
 tions of ebb and flow, of darkness and light, are 
 
no MY STUDY FIRE. 
 
 not unknown to the greatest souls; they are the 
 invariable accompaniments of that quality of soul 
 which makes a man the interpreter of his fellow and 
 of the world which is common ground between them. 
 There is something above us whose instruments we 
 are ; there are currents of inspiration which touch 
 us and our strength is "as the strength of ten"; 
 which pass from us and, like Samson shorn, we are 
 as pygmies with other pygmies. No man wholly 
 commands these affluent moods, these creative 
 impulses ; but some men learn the secret of appro- 
 priating them, of keeping within their range. These 
 are the men who hold themselves with immovable 
 purpose to the conditions of their work ; who refuse 
 all solicitations, resist all temptations, to compromise 
 with customary habits and pleasures ; who keep 
 themselves in their own world, and, working or 
 waiting, achieve complete self-expression. "I am 
 always at work," said a great artist, "and when an 
 inspiration comes I am ready to make the most of 
 it." Inspiration rarely leaves such a man long 
 unvisited. One looks at Turner's pictures with 
 wonder in his heart. In this rushing, roaring, sooty 
 London, with its leaden skies, its returning clouds 
 and obscuring fogs, how were such dreams wooed 
 and won? The painter's life answers the question. 
 London had small share of Turner; he lived in a 
 world of his own making, and the flush of its sky, 
 the glory of its golden atmosphere, never wholly 
 faded from his vision. 
 
CHAPTER XVIII. 
 
 BOOKS AND THINGS. 
 
 One of the pleasantest features of life is the un- 
 conscious faculty which most things possess of 
 forming themselves into groups, or allying them- 
 selves with each other in the most delightful associa- 
 tions. How easy and how agreeable it is to sur- 
 round one's self with an atmosphere of congenial 
 habits and customs ! One wakes in the morning to 
 a day that is no empty house to be explored and 
 warmed and made habitable, but which stretches 
 pleasantly on like a familiar bit of road, with its 
 well-remembered turns and resting-places. It is a 
 delightful prelude to the new day to recall, in a 
 brief review just before rising, the dear faces of the 
 household one is to see again, the sunny rooms to 
 which one will shortly descend, the open fire be- 
 fore which one will stand while breakfast is being 
 laid, the books still open from last night's reading, 
 the friendly voices soon to be heard on the street, 
 and the accustomed work waiting for one's hand. 
 With such pictures in his mind one rises cheerfully 
 to meet the toils and demands of another working 
 day. The law of association weaves a man's life 
 after a time into a rich and varied texture, in which 
 
H2 MY STUDY FIRE. 
 
 the sober threads of care and work are interwoven 
 with the soft hues of love and the splendid dyes 
 of imagination; feelings, thoughts, actions, are no 
 longer detached and isolated ; they are blended to- 
 gether into the fullness and symmetry of a rich life. 
 One's toil gathers sweetness from the thought of 
 those to whose comfort it ministers ; one's books are 
 enriched by the consciousness of the immeasurable 
 life from which they flow as tiny rivulets; one's 
 friends stand for genius and art and noble achieve- 
 ment; and one's life ceases to be a single strain, and 
 becomes a harmony of many chords, each suggesting 
 and deepening the melody of every other. 
 
 Last evening, after dinner, Rosalind, after her 
 usual custom, began playing some simple, beautiful 
 German compositions, to which the children never 
 fail to respond with a merry frolic. When she came 
 to the end of the daily programme, one of the dan- 
 cers, golden hair all in disorder, pointed to a page 
 in the open music book, and said : "Mamma, please 
 play that ; it always makes me think of ' Baby Bell. ' " 
 Happy Mr. Aldrich ! Could anything be more de- 
 lightful than to know that one's verse is associated 
 with music in the mind of a child ! The simple re- 
 quest, with its reason, made a deep impression on 
 me ; I saw for the first time how early the sense of 
 universal beauty is awake in childhood, and how 
 instinctively it sees that all beautiful things are akin 
 to each other. It was the first page in that sublime 
 revelation of the soul of things through which a man 
 
BOOKS AND THINGS. 113 
 
 comes at last to see in one vision the flower at his 
 feet and the evening star silvery and solitary on the 
 girdle of the early night, the radiant smile on the 
 face that he loves and the great measureless wealth 
 of sunshine across the summer fields. It is this 
 clear perception of the universal relationship of 
 things which makes a man a scholar instead of a 
 pedant, and turns a library into a place of inspiration 
 and impulse instead of a place of memory and repose. 
 
 In my experience the association between books 
 and music is intimate and ever recurring. I never 
 hear a certain piece of Haydn's without seeing, on 
 the instant, the massive ranges of the Scottish High- 
 lands as they rise into the still heavens in the pages 
 of Walter Scott's "Waverley" ; and there is another 
 simple melody which carries me back to the ship- 
 wreck in the "^Eneid." Some books seem to have 
 found a more subtle rendering at the hands of 
 Chopin ; and there are others which recall move- 
 ments in Beethoven's symphonies. For this reason 
 it is a great delight to read with a soft accompani- 
 ment of music in another room; there always 
 remains an echo of melody hidden in the heart of 
 thoughts that have come to one under such circum- 
 stances, and which gives back its unheard note 
 when they are read again elsewhere. In reading 
 Milton one rarely forgets that the hand which wrote 
 "Paradise Lost" knew the secrets of the organ 
 and could turn them into sound at will. 
 
 How many and how rich are the personal associa- 
 
H4 MY STUDY FIRE. 
 
 tions of books that have gradually been brought 
 together as one needed them for his work, and was 
 drawn there by some personal longing! This book 
 has the author's name written in a characteristic 
 hand on the fly-leaf; between the leaves of its 
 neighbor is hidden a friendly note from the writer, 
 recalling the peculiar circumstances under which it 
 was written ; and in this famous novel which lies 
 open before me there is a rose which bloomed last 
 summer across the sea in the novelist's garden in 
 Surrey. In a place by themselves are six little vol- 
 umes worn with much reading and with many jour- 
 neyings. For many years they were the constant 
 companions of one whose hand touched some of the 
 deepest chords of life, and made a music of her own 
 which the world will not soon forget. They speak 
 to me sometimes with the clearness and authority of 
 her own words, so many are the traces which she 
 has left upon them of intimate fellowship. They 
 have been read by the fjords of Norway and the 
 lakes of Italy, and I never open them without feel- 
 ing the presence of that eager and aspiring spirit to 
 whom every day was an open door to a new truth 
 and a fresh life. Indeed, I am never so near the 
 world as in my study, nor do I ever feel elsewhere the 
 burden and mystery of life coming in upon me with 
 such awful and subduing power. There are hours 
 when these laden shelves seem to me like some vast 
 organ upon whose keys an unseen hand evokes the 
 full harmony of life. 
 
BOOKS AND THINGS. 115 
 
 What a magical power of recalling past intellectual 
 experiences familiar books possess! — experiences 
 that were the beginnings of new epochs in our per- 
 sonal history. One may almost recount the growth 
 of his mind by the titles of great books ; the first 
 reading of Carlyle's essay on "Characteristics," of 
 Emerson's "Nature," of Goethe's "Faust," of 
 Coleridge's ' 'Literaria Biographica" — how the fresh- 
 ness and inspiration of those hours of dawning in- 
 sight come back to one as he turns the well-worn 
 leaves! It used to be regarded as a rare piece of 
 good fortune to have the opportunity of loaning 
 books to Coleridge ; the great thinker always re- 
 turned them with margins enriched with criticisms 
 and comments and references often of far greater 
 value than the text itself. A book so annotated, 
 with the initials S. T. C. on every other page, became 
 thereafter too precious ever to be loaned again. In 
 like manner there are written on the margins of the 
 books we have about us all manner of personal inci- 
 dent and history ; no one reads these invisible rec- 
 ords but ourselves, but to us they sometimes out- 
 weight the book itself. 
 
CHAPTER XIX. 
 
 A RARE NATURE. 
 
 Among the multitude of books which find their 
 way to the light of my study fire there comes, at 
 long intervals, one which searches my own conscious- 
 ness to the depths and on the instant compels my 
 recognition of that rare creation, a true work of art. 
 The indefinable atmosphere, the incommunicable 
 touch, of perfection are about and upon it, and one 
 is suddenly conscious of a new and everlasting pos- 
 session for the race. Such a book lies open before 
 me; it is the "Journal Intime" of Henri Frederic 
 Amiel. "There is a point of perfection in art," 
 says La Bruyere, "as there is of goodness and ripe- 
 ness in nature; he who feels and loves it has perfect 
 taste; he who feels it not, and who loves something 
 beneath or beyond it, has faulty taste." The per- 
 fection which I feel in this book is something 
 deeper and diviner than taste; it is a matter of 
 soul, and must therefore remain undescribed. Like 
 the flawless line of beauty, it will instantly reveal 
 itself to those who have the instinct for art, and 
 to those who fail to perceive it at the first glance it 
 will remain forever invisible. There is in some na- 
 tures a quality of ripeness which makes all the hard 
 116 
 
 I 
 
 4 
 
A RARE NATURE. 117 
 
 processes of growth sweet and, in the general con- 
 fusion of this workshop stage of life, gives us a sud- 
 den glimpse of perfection. Not that Amiel was a 
 man of symmetrical character or life; in neither of 
 these two master lines of action did he achieve any- 
 thing like complete success; to himself, as to his 
 best friends, rj»e was but a promise, and at his death 
 it seemed as if even the promise had failed. Never- 
 theless there was in this man of infirm will and im- 
 perfect development a quality of soul which must 
 be counted rare at all times, and which, in this pres- 
 ent era of bustle and energy, brings something of 
 the surprise of a revelation with it. These discon- 
 nected and unmethodical meditations, extending 
 over a period of thirty-three years, are a kind of 
 subtle distillation of life in which one feels in its 
 finer essence the whole body of modern thinking 
 and feeling. This "Journal Intime" is the sole 
 fruit of a period of time long enough to contain the 
 activities of a whole generation ; but how much 
 more significant is the silence of such a book than 
 the articulate speech of great masses of men ! It is 
 something that, at the bottom of this great restless 
 ocean of modern life, such a pearl as this lay hid. 
 
 Amiel stands for a class of men of genius, of 
 keenly receptive and intensely sensitive tempera- 
 ment; men like Joubert and Maurice de Guerin, 
 whose lives are as rich on the side of thought as 
 they are unproductive on the side of action. Such 
 men teach almost as much through their defects as 
 
Jl8 MY STUDY FIRE. 
 
 through their strength. Perhaps it is true that the 
 quality of ripeness one finds in such natures is due 
 to a preponderance of the ideal sufficient to destroy 
 the balance of character. Men of this fiber absorb 
 experience, and produce only scantily, but their 
 production has an unmistakable stamp upon it; 
 they are not interpreters of universal life, but they 
 slowly distill from life a few truths of luminous qual- 
 ity. They recall the profound saying of Alfred de 
 Musset, that it takes a great deal of life to make 
 a little art; the movement of a generation yields 
 them a few meditations, but somehow these seem to 
 open everything up and to make us feel how pre- 
 cious is thought, since such a vast range of action is 
 needed to give it adequate and complete expression. 
 After Napoleon has stormed through Europe and 
 filled the world with the dust and uproar of change, 
 a quiet thinker, living and dying far from the cur- 
 rent of events, interprets for us the two or three 
 ideas which gave the sword of the soldier its only 
 significance and dignity. 
 
 There are a few eternal elements in life, but these 
 are hidden for the most part by the dust of traffic 
 and travel. Men hurry to and fro in search of 
 truth, and are unconscious that it shines over them 
 with the luster of a fixed star if they would keep 
 silent for a little, and let the air clarify itself, and 
 the heavens become visible once more. No life 
 gains its perfect poise without action, but in the ex- 
 aggerated emphasis laid upon works of hand in this 
 
A RARE NATURE. 119 
 
 Western world one is often tempted at times by the 
 silent solicitation of the meditative East. There, in 
 the hush of thought, men have always been con- 
 scious of their souls, and, if they have fallen into 
 the tideless sea of pantheism, have at least been 
 delivered from the hard and dusty ways of material- 
 ism. The just balance of life among us is preserved 
 by such men as Amiel ; men who keep apart from 
 crowds and in the perpetual presence of the ever- 
 lasting verities. There is in such men a wonderful 
 freshness of thought, which makes us conscious of 
 the arid atmosphere in which most of us work and 
 suffocate. Life is old only to those who live in its 
 conventions and formulas; the soil is exhausted 
 only for those whose plowshare turns the shallow 
 furrow. To all others it is still fresh with undis- 
 covered truth, still inexhaustible in the wealth with 
 which the Infinite Mind has stored it, as the Infi- 
 nite Hand has filled its veins with gold and its 
 mountains with iron. Amiel's life was not one of 
 those overflowing rivers which make continents blos- 
 som as they sweep to the sea; it was rather one of 
 those deep wells which are fed by hidden rills, into 
 which a few stars shine with strange luster, and which 
 have power to assuage the thirst of the soul. 
 
CHAPTER XX. 
 
 THE CUCKOO STRIKES TWELVE. 
 
 "If Rosalind were here," I said to myself, as I 
 gave the fire a vigorous stirring — "if Rosalind were 
 here, the fire would burn with better heart. " Every- 
 thing takes advantage of Rosalind's absence; the 
 house is less friendly and hospitable, and has become 
 at times neglectful of that soothing ministration of 
 a home to one's unconscious longings for mute com- 
 panionship ; the study has lost something which I 
 cannot define, but the going of which has carried 
 the charm of the place with it ; even here the fire, 
 which has been cheerful in all weathers, and set a 
 persistent glow on the front of the sullen days, is 
 sluggish and faint-hearted. "Why should I sing 
 and shine if there is no face to put a halo about?" 
 it seems to mutter to itself as the sticks fall apart 
 and the blaze smolders again for the twentieth time. 
 It is a still wintry night, and one cannot resist 
 the mood which bears him on into the silence and 
 solitude of meditation. Without, the lonely stars 
 watch the lonely earth across the abysses of space 
 which nothing traverses save the invisible feet of 
 light. The moon is waning below the horizon which 
 shows yet no silvery token of its coming; the earth 
 
THE CUCKOO STRIKES TWELVE. 121 
 
 sleeps under the ancient spell of winter. One is 
 driven back on himself by a world which, for the 
 time, is as mute as if birds had never sung, nor forest 
 rustled, nor brooks prattled. One is driven back 
 upon himself, and finds the society neither stimula- 
 ting nor agreeable. There are times when one is 
 excellent company for one's self, but not on such a 
 night as this, when the house is deserted, and 
 the fire watches for a chance to go out. 
 
 I suspect that the companionship of the open fire 
 is, after all, a negative thing ; an accompaniment to 
 which one's own mood furnishes the theme that is 
 aways elaborated and expanded. If you are cheer- 
 ful, your fire sings to you ; if you are overcast, its 
 faint and melancholy glow makes the clouds that 
 encompass more threatening. It rises or sinks with 
 your mood, and its song strikes the major or the 
 minor tone according to the pitch of your thought. 
 The man who can cheerfully "toast his toes" in 
 all weathers will never lack a servile fire to flatter 
 his self-satisfaction. Such a man is always housed 
 against the storm ; he is never abroad with the tem- 
 pests. His little capital of life and love is a buried 
 treasure which will not be lost in any venture; it 
 feeds no large desire, sustains no noble hope, is 
 multiplied into no wealth that may be divided and 
 subdivided until it makes the many rich. The 
 miserly man is of all men the most unlucky when he 
 counts his fortune by the light of the solitary fire. 
 It is all there; he touches every shining piece 
 
122 MY STUDY FIRE. 
 
 and knows that it is safe. But where are those 
 greater possessions which yield the priceless revenues 
 of love and happiness? They are gained only by 
 those who make great ventures ; who invest all their 
 hope and joy for the sake of the larger return which 
 this inherited wealth, fortunately invested, secures. 
 It is a great risk; but what large adventure, what 
 splendid achievement, comes unattended with risk? 
 He only is perfectly secure from loss who hoards 
 his treasure until it corrupts itself for want of use. 
 On the other hand, as Lessing has said, he makes 
 noble shipwreck who is lost in seeking worlds. It 
 is better to go down on the great seas which human 
 hearts were made to sail than to rot at the wharves in 
 ignoble anchorage. It is far better to put one's whole 
 life into some noble venture of love or service than to 
 sit at home with slippered feet always on the fender. 
 "If Rosalind were here," I said to myself again, 
 "this fire would surely need less frequent stirring." 
 When I laid the poker down and settled myself for 
 further meditation, the blaze suddenly kindled and 
 brought the whole room into cheerful relief. In 
 the ruddy light my eyes caught the title of a famous 
 book whose pages are often open in my hand. It 
 was like coming unexpectedly upon a friend when 
 one thought one's self alone. I took it from its 
 place and let it fall open upon my knee, where the 
 dancing light wove arabesques of gold about the text, 
 as the monks in the scriptorium once intertwined 
 the black letter with the glory of bird and flower. 
 
THE CUCKOO STRIKES TWELVE. 123 
 
 It was a wonderful book which lay there open to the 
 fire; a book which is "the precious life-blood of a 
 master-spirit, imbalm'd and treasur'd up on purpose 
 to a life beyond life": a book deep almost as 
 thought and great almost as life. I did not read 
 the lines that were clearly legible on my knee ; the 
 great book seemed to speak its whole message with- 
 out words. I recalled the story of the man that 
 wrote it; I followed him step by step through his 
 stormy and arduous life; I remembered all his losses 
 and sacrifices; I understood as never before the 
 completeness of his self-surrender. He had been a 
 world-seeker; he had missed the lower comforts of 
 life; for him the alien stars had burned, but not the 
 cheerful fire of unadventurous ease. Had he made 
 shipwreck? If he had, his going down had strewn 
 the shores of all time with a wreckage so precious 
 that it had made the whole world rich. This man 
 had put his whole life of happiness into two great 
 ventures ; he had risked all for love, and again he 
 had risked all for the city that bore him; and his was 
 a double loss. Of his splendid fortune of personal 
 happiness there remained but a beatific vision and 
 a lifelong devotion scorned and rejected. Surely it 
 were better to live at ease with one's self and one's 
 fire than tempt fortune thus ! But then, I thought, 
 are not the man and the book and the vision and 
 the great life to be reckoned in the full accounting? 
 Out of the bitter root of personal loss and sorrow 
 these immortal flowers have bloomed ! 
 
124 MY STUDY FIRE. 
 
 "If Rosalind were here," I said to the fire, which 
 was now burning cheerfully, "she would show us 
 the heart of this matter." And as I fell to think- 
 ing about her again, I saw how manifold are the 
 workings of the law that man must lose his life if he 
 would find it, must give himself if he would really 
 possess himself. I recalled one by one the books 
 that had spoken to me in the crises of my life, or had 
 been my companions when the road ran straight and 
 sunny before me, and I understood that, one and 
 all, these were the returns from great ventures, the 
 rewards of great risks. I saw that these great 
 spiritual and intellectual treasures had been gotten 
 on many shores, plucked from the depths of many 
 seas ; that no man is ever rich enough to divide with 
 his fellows or bequeath to posterity unless he puts 
 his heart into some great affection, and his whole 
 thought into some great enterprise. The men who 
 sit at home have neither beneficiaries nor heirs; they 
 possess nothing but their poverty, and that vanishes 
 with them when death makes up the impartial 
 account. After all, I said to myself, no one is ever 
 poor who has once been rich ; for the real return of 
 a great venture is in the expansion and enrichment 
 of one's own nature; and that cannot fly from us as 
 the shy bird happiness so often escapes into the upper 
 sky whence it came to build its fragile nest in our 
 hearts. To have done some great service and felt 
 the thrill of it, is enough to remember when the 
 hour is passed and the deed forgotten ; to have 
 
THE CUCKOO STRIKES TWELVE. 125 
 
 poured one's whole life into some great affection is 
 never to be impoverished again. After the beautiful 
 face became first a beautiful memory and then a 
 heavenly vision, the poet was never again alone; in 
 all his arduous wanderings there was with him one 
 whose footfall in Paradise all the world has listened 
 to hear. Love is the only synonym in any earthly 
 speech for immortality; it has no past, for it carries 
 all that it has been in its heart; and it has no future, 
 for it already realizes its own completeness and 
 finality. To have seen once the heart of a pure, 
 loyal, and noble nature is to have gained an imper- 
 ishable possession. 
 
 Just then the silence in which I sat was broken ; 
 the cuckoo flew out of his little door and chaunted 
 twelve cheerful notes. "It makes all the difference 
 in the world," I said to myself, "how you report 
 the flight of time. You may have a hammer ring 
 the hours for you on hard and resonant metal, or you 
 may cage a bird and set the years to music." And 
 I remembered how long that tiny song had broken 
 on my ears ; how it had blended with the first thril- 
 ling, articulate cry of life, and how it had kept 
 record of hours of great agonies and joys. Through 
 the darkness as the light, its cheerful song had set 
 the days and years to an impartial music. Did I 
 dream then, as I listened, before the dying fire, to 
 the echoes of the vanished years, that a bird flew 
 out of Paradise, and, alone of all the heavenly brood, 
 returned no more, but built its nest along the ways 
 
126 MY STUDY FIRE. 
 
 of men, seeking always for one to whom its divine 
 song should be audible; and that, having heard that 
 thrilling note, the chosen ones heard no other sound, 
 but followed whithersoever the song led them, and 
 knew that at the end it would not die out in the even- 
 ing sky! "If Rosalind were here," I said to the 
 fire as I covered the warm coals for the night — "if 
 Rosalind were here — " 
 
CHAPTER XXI. 
 
 A GLIMPSE OF SPRING. 
 
 Looking out of the study windows this morning, 
 Rosalind noticed a sudden change in the group of 
 willows on the hill. There was a tinge of fresh color 
 in the mass of twigs which we recognized as the earli- 
 est harbinger of spring. In the sky there was a 
 momentary softness of tone which turned the dial 
 of thought forward on the instant, and we waited 
 expectant for the reedy note that should tell us of 
 the coming of the birds and the freshness of the 
 early summer on the woods and hills. The illusion 
 lasts but a moment, for the March winds are rising, 
 and the gray clouds will soon overshadow the sky. 
 But fancy has been loosened, and will not return to 
 its wonted subjection to the work of the day. The 
 subject one is studying is flat, stale, and unprofit- 
 able; one no sooner settles down to it than the fra- 
 grance of the apple blossom, borne from some silent 
 field of memory or from some sunny orchard of the 
 imagination, turns all the eager search for knowl- 
 edge into ashes. When such a mood comes, as 
 come it will when prophecies of spring are abroad, 
 it is better to yield to the spell than to make a futile 
 resistance. 
 
 127 
 
128 MY STUDY FIRE. 
 
 There is a volume close at hand which fits the day 
 and the mood. It is Richard Jefferies's "Field and 
 Hedgerow," the last word of one through whose 
 heart and hand so much of the ripe loveliness of the 
 English summer passed into English speech. One 
 has but to open its pages and he finds himself be- 
 tween the blossoming hedges waiting for that thrill- 
 ing music which lies hidden with the nightingale in 
 the copse. T give myself up to the spell of this 
 beautiful book, and straightway I am loitering in the 
 wheat fields; I cross the old bridge where the once 
 busy wheel has grown decrepit and moss-covered 
 with age ; I stroll through the deer park, shaded by 
 venerable oaks ; I pause at last in the old village 
 where the repose and quaintness of an earlier and 
 more rustic age still linger. Every flower, every 
 grass, every tree, every bird, is known to my com- 
 panion ; and he knows, also, every road and by-path. 
 Nothing escapes his eye, nothing eludes the record 
 of his memory: "Acres of perfume come on the 
 wind from the black and white of the bean field ; the 
 firs fill the air by the copse with perfume. I know 
 nothing to which the wind has not some happy use. 
 Is there a grain of dust so small the wind shall not 
 find it out? Ground in the mill-wheel of the centu- 
 ries, the iron of the distant mountain floats like gossa- 
 mer, and is drank up as dew by leaf and living lung. 
 A thousand miles of cloud go by from morn till 
 night, passing overhead without a sound ; the im- 
 mense packs, a mile square, succeed to each other, 
 
A GLIMPSE OF SPRING. 129 
 
 side by side, laid parallel, book-shape, coming up 
 from the horizon and widening as they approach. 
 From morn till night the silent footfalls of the pon- 
 derous vapors travel overhead, no sound, no creak- 
 ing of the wheels and rattling of the chains; it is 
 calm at the earth; but the wind labors without an 
 effort above, with such ease, with such power. Gray 
 smoke hangs on the hillside where the couch-heaps 
 are piled, a cumulus of smoke; the wind comes, and 
 it draws its length along like the genii from the 
 earthen pot; there leaps up a great red flame, shak- 
 ing its head; it shines in the bright sunlight; you 
 can see it across the valley." 
 
 But, as I read, the moving world about me grows 
 vague and indistinct; I find myself thinking more 
 and more of my companion. What a glance is his 
 which sweeps the horizon and leaves no stir of life 
 unnoted ; which follows the bird in its flight and 
 detects the instinct which builds its nest and evokes 
 its song; which searches the field and records every 
 change in the tiny flower of the grass! How spa- 
 cious must be the mind, how full the heart, how 
 self-centered the life, when one matches with the 
 immeasurable beauty of the world the genius which 
 searches the heart of it all ! This man surely must 
 see his own way clear, must hold his own course 
 without doubt or question, must need no help of 
 human recognition, while his eye sees with such un- 
 erring clearness and his heart beats with the heart 
 of nature herself! Was it so with Jefferies? I turn 
 9 
 
13° MY STUDY FIRE. 
 
 from the book and recall the story of his long, heroic 
 struggles with poverty, ending at last in a great 
 agony of disease and death. Not quite three years 
 ago he wrote: "I received letters from New Zea- 
 land, from the United States, even from the islands 
 of the Pacific, from people who had read my writ- 
 ings. It seemed so strange that I should read these 
 letters, and yet all the time be writhing in agony." 
 "With truth I think I may say that there are few, 
 very few, perhaps none, living who have gone 
 through such a series of diseases. There are many 
 dead — many who have killed themselves for a tenth 
 part of the pain; there are few living. " And a 
 friend has written of him: "Who can picture the 
 torture of these long years to him, denied as he was 
 the strength to walk so much as one hundred yards 
 in the world he loved so well? What hero like this, 
 fighting with Death face to face so long, fearing and 
 knowing, alas! too well, that no struggles could 
 avail, and, worse than all, that his dear ones would 
 be left friendless and penniless? Thus died a man 
 whose name will be first, perhaps forever, in his own 
 special work." I turn to the last words written by 
 his pen three years ago this spring: "I wonder to 
 myself how they can all get on without me ; how 
 they manage, bird and flower, without me, to keep 
 the calendar for them. . . . They go on without 
 me, orchis-flower and cowslip. I cannot number 
 them all. I hear, as it were, the patter of their feet — 
 flower and buds, and the beautiful clouds that, go 
 
A GLIMPSE OF SPRING. I3 1 
 
 over, with the sweet rush of rain and burst of sun- 
 glory among the leafy trees. They go on, and I am 
 no more than the least of the empty shells that strew 
 the sward of the hill." He has told the heart of 
 his story in a sentence: "Three great giants are 
 against me: disease, despair, and poverty." 
 
 These terrible words, in which the uttermost 
 agony of a human soul speaks, blot out for the mo- 
 ment the vision of fair fields and golden weather: 
 and one closes the book and falls to thinking. The 
 story is an old one ; it has been told of many a great 
 heart whose work freights these cases with the weight 
 of immortal thought; and it is the consciousness 
 that these teachers and singers, these strong, un- 
 conquerable spirits, these loyal, aspiring souls, have 
 shared with us the common lot of men, have suffered 
 and despaired with the great army of humanity, 
 which gives their works sustaining power. These 
 books, in which we read the story of our own lives, 
 were not the work of demi-gods secluded from the 
 uncertainty and bitterness of human fortune in some 
 serene world of art; our weaknesses, our irresolu- 
 tion, our temptations, our blindnesses and misgiv- 
 ings, were theirs also. And if they have held to the 
 truth of their visions and the reality of their ideals, 
 it has not been because they escaped the common 
 lot, but because they held their way through it with 
 unshaken resolution. Genius does not separate its 
 possessors from their fellows ; it makes them the 
 more human by its power to uncover the deeps of 
 
132 MY STUDY FIRE. 
 
 experience, to unlock the innermost chambers of 
 the heart, to enter into all that life is and means, 
 not only to one's self but to humanity. No human 
 soul that comes to full self-knowledge escapes the 
 penalty of growth into truth and power: the penalty 
 of pain, of doubt and uncertainty, of misconcep- 
 tions of spirit and purpose; of bitter struggle to 
 make hard facts the helpers in the search and strife 
 for freedom and fullness of life ; of long waiting ; 
 of the sense of loneliness among one's fellows; of 
 the slow achievement through faith and patience. < 
 
 It has been said that the pathos of antique life 
 lay in the contrast between the beauty of the world 
 and man's few and broken years; and that the 
 pathos of medieval life lay in the contrast between 
 the same beauty become a manifold temptation, and 
 the soul of man, a stranger amid its shows and splen- 
 dors, lodged in a cell while the heavens were blue, 
 scourged and fasting while birds and wind sang the 
 universal song of joy and freedom. The pathos of 
 all time and life is the contrast between the illimita- 
 ble thirst and the unsatisfying draught, between the 
 flying ideal and the lagging real, between the dream 
 and the accomplishment, between aspiration and 
 capacity and power on the one hand, and change, 
 limitation, disease, and death on the other. Litera- 
 ture knows this pathos but too well ; the pathos to 
 which no great soul and no great life is ever alien. 
 
 The book has long since slipped from my hand, 
 and a somber shadow seems to have quenched the 
 
 S 
 
GLIMPSE OF SPRING. 1 33 
 
 glow of the fire. Out of the window the world lies 
 cold and cheerless ; bitter winds are abroad ; the 
 leaden sky is hidden by a flurry of snow. Winter 
 is supreme everywhere. But the faint color on the 
 willows silently speaks of softer skies and golden 
 weather ! 
 
CHAPTER XXII. 
 
 A PRIMEVAL MOOD. 
 
 The early spring days come freighted with strange, 
 vague longings ; there is in them some subtle breath 
 of the unconfined, universal life-spirit, which fills us 
 with a momentary antagonism to all our habits, 
 customs, and occupations, and inspires us with a 
 desire to be free of all obligations, duties, and respon- 
 sibilities. The primitive lawlessness in our blood 
 seems to stir dimly with the first movements of life 
 under the sod and within the silence of the woods. 
 Some long-forgotten existence, antedating all our 
 institutions and the very beginnings of society, is 
 dimly reflected in the depths of consciousness, and 
 makes us restless with desire to repossess ourselves 
 of a lost knowledge, to recover a whole epoch of 
 primitive experience faded to the vaguest of shadows 
 in the memory. 
 
 I am not sure that Rosalind will enter into this 
 mood, or that, if she should, she would think it prof- 
 itable or healthful. I keep it to myself, therefore; 
 feeling quite safe, within the circle of light which 
 falls from the shaded lamp about her, from all hea- 
 thenish and uncivilized impulses. Indeed, I think 
 it would be better if we could feel, amid our intense 
 i34 
 
A PRIMEVAL MOOD. ^35 
 
 activities to-day, a little more of the pulse of the 
 free and trustful life which lies like a forgotten page 
 at the beginning of the great volume of human his- 
 tory. Progress and civilization are normal, health- 
 ful, inevitable; it takes very little knowledge and 
 thought to detect the fundamental error in Rous- 
 seau's theories of the natural state of man, or in the 
 occasional play of intellectual willfulness which 
 declares for barbarism as more normal and noble 
 than civilization. Nevertheless, there are certain 
 things which men are likely to lose in the swift move- 
 ment of modern life which have always been among 
 their best possessions. Freshness of perception, a 
 sensitive mental retina, openness to the unobtrusive 
 but wonderfully significant procession of star and 
 flower and storm-cloud — these are among the pre- 
 cious things which men have largely lost by the 
 way. The intense retrospection of modern life has 
 given us a marvelously rich literature of subjective 
 observation and meditation ; but we are in danger 
 of missing the freshness, the joy, the poetic impres- 
 siveness of the world that lies within the empire of 
 the senses. This thought was in Wordsworth's 
 mind when he wrote that profound and moving 
 sonnet: 
 
 " The world is too much with us ; late and soon, 
 Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers : 
 
 Little we see in Nature that is ours ; 
 
 We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon ! 
 
 This sea that bares her bosom to the moon ; 
 
I3 6 MY STUDY FIRE. 
 
 The winds that will be howling at all hours 
 And are up-gather'd now like sleeping flowers — 
 
 For this, for everything, we are out of tune ; 
 It moves us not. Great God ! I'd rather be 
 
 A pagan suckled in a creed outworn, 
 So might I, standing on this pleasant lea, 
 
 Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn ; 
 Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea, 
 
 Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn." 
 
 The note of revolt in these striking lines is not 
 unfamiliar to men and women in whom the poetic 
 mood survives and at times asserts itself with the 
 momentary tyranny of a king who has forgotten that 
 he is dethroned. In every healthful nature there 
 must be an outlet into the ancient life of fresh impres- 
 sions, of senses still unsubdued to the work of the 
 calculating intellect, of impulses still vigorous with 
 unspent vitality. It is to satisfy this craving that 
 some men find themselves drawn irresistibly at times 
 to the Odyssey, with its free, fresh life of move- 
 ment and action ; it is because the great race legends 
 of the Scandinavian, the German, and the Celt have 
 this breath of the morning upon them that they take 
 possession of the imagination and stir such vague 
 but passionate responses within us. It is to satisfy 
 this craving, no doubt, that a young poet now and 
 then gives rein to his imagination, and celebrates his 
 freedom in verse better suited to Bacchic and other 
 lost pagan moods than to modern ears ; and, recall- 
 ing the exuberant vitality of such a youth as Goethe's 
 before it had learned that obedience is the only road 
 
A PRIMEVAL MOOD. 137 
 
 to freedom, we are not surprised to hear him say to 
 Merck in the early Weimar days : "We are some- 
 what mad here, and play the devil's own game." 
 
 While I had been letting my thoughts run in this 
 riotous fashion Rosalind had been intently reading 
 Maurice de Guerin. Suddenly she looked up from 
 the book and read aloud some striking sentences 
 from that exquisite piece of poetic interpretation, 
 the "Centaur." The old Centaur is telling the 
 story of his wonderful early life, with its seclusion, its 
 unfettered freedom, its kinship with nature, its near- 
 ness to the gods. There is in the story a deep sin- 
 cerity, a simplicity, a strange familiarity with the 
 secrets and mysteries of nature, which never cease 
 to touch me as a kind of new power in literature. 
 The Centaur describes his wild, far wanderings 
 through the deep valleys and along the mountain 
 summits until the evening shadows began to fill the 
 recesses of the remoter hills. "But when Night, 
 filled with the charm of the gods, overtook me on 
 the slopes of the mountain, she guided me to the 
 mouth of the caverns, and there tranquilized me as 
 she tranquilizes the billows of the sea. Stretched 
 across the threshold of my retreat, my flanks hidden 
 within the cave, and my head under the open sky, 
 I watched the spectacle of the dark. The sea gods, 
 it is said, quit during the hours of darkness their 
 places under the deep ; they seat themselves on the 
 promontories, and their eyes wander over the 
 expanse of the waves. Even so I kept watch, hav- 
 
138 MY STUDY FIRE. 
 
 ing at my feet an expanse of life like the hushed 
 sea. My regards had free range, and traveled to the 
 most distant points. Like sea beaches which never 
 lose their wetness, the line of mountains to the west 
 retained the imprint of gleams not perfectly wiped 
 out by the shadows. In that quarter still survived, 
 in pale clearness, mountain summits naked and pure. 
 There I beheld at one time the god Pan descend 
 ever solitary; at another, the choir of the mystic 
 divinities ; or I saw some mountain nymph charm- 
 struck by the night. Sometimes the eagles of Mount 
 Olympus traversed the upper sky, and were lost to 
 view among the far-off constellations, or in the shade 
 of the dreaming forests." 
 
 I cannot describe the eloquence of these words 
 as Rosalind read them, with rising color and deepen- 
 ing tone ; the eloquence of the imagination narra- 
 ting the past, and making its most wondrous forms 
 live again. The secret of the Centaur perished 
 with him, but not the charm of his life. The 
 wild, free range of being, with vision of descending 
 deities and spell-bound nymphs ; the fellowship with 
 mighty forces that science has never tamed; the 
 sway of impulses that rise out of the vast uncon- 
 scious life of nature — these still penetrate at times 
 our habits and occupations, and find our hearts 
 fresh and responsive. It is then that we draw away 
 from men for a season, and become one of those of 
 whom the same wise Centaur said that they had 
 "picked up on the waters or in the woods, and car- 
 
A PRIMEVAL MOOD. 139 
 
 ried to their lips, some pieces of the reed pipe thrown 
 away by the god Pan. From that hour these mor- 
 tals, having caught from their relics of the god a 
 passion for wild life, or perhaps smitten with some 
 secret madness, enter into the wilderness, plunge 
 among the forests, follow the course of the streams, 
 bury themselves in the heart of the mountains, rest- 
 less, and haunted by an unknown purpose." 
 
CHAPTER XXIII. 
 
 THE METHOD OF GENIUS. 
 
 Rosalind had been so absorbed in reading Mr. 
 Lowell's essay on Gray that she had not noted the 
 slow sinking of the fire; it was only when she had 
 finished that noble piece of criticism and laid aside 
 the volume that she became suddenly conscious of 
 her lapse of duty, and began to make vigorous repa- 
 ration for her oversight. For a moment the flame 
 crept cautiously along the edges of the wood; and 
 then, taking heart from glowing fellowship, sud- 
 denly burst into full blaze and answered the roar- 
 ing wind without with its own note of defiance. I 
 sat quietly behind my desk, enjoying the various 
 charming pictures, framed in mingled light and 
 shadow, which Rosalind's struggle with the fire 
 seemed to project into the room. I am sure that 
 the charm is in her, and that the illusive play of 
 imagination, the soft and wandering glow touching 
 now a book and now a picture, the genial warmth 
 which pervades the place, are really a subtle 
 materialization of her qualities. For me at least, 
 the fire loses its gentle monotone of consolation 
 when her face is not transfigured by it, and I enjoy 
 it most when I feel most deeply that it is but a sym- 
 bol of that which she has added to my life. 
 140 
 
THE METHOD OF GENIUS. 141 
 
 I was saying that Rosalind had been reading Mr. 
 Lowell's essay on Gray. When she had stirred the 
 smoldering flame into a blaze, she opened the book 
 again and read aloud here and there a luminous 
 criticism, or one of those perfect felicities of style 
 which thrill one as with a sudden music. When 
 she had finished she said, with a half-sigh: "I am 
 sure there can be but one pleasure greater than the 
 reading of such a piece of work, and that is the 
 writing of it. Why does it kindle my imagination 
 so powerfully? why does it make everything I have 
 read lately seem thin and cold?" 
 
 There is a soft glow on her face as she asks this 
 question, which I cannot help thinking is the most 
 charming tribute ever paid even to Mr. Lowell, a 
 writer fortunate beyond most men of genius in the 
 recognition of his contemporaries. The question 
 and the face tempt me away from desk and my task, 
 and invite me to the easy-chair from whence I have 
 so often studied the vagaries of the restless fire. 
 Rosalind's question goes to the very heart of the 
 greatest of the arts, and has a personal interest be- 
 cause she takes as her text one of the best known 
 and best loved of the friends whose silent speech 
 makes this room eloquent. The second series of 
 "Among My Books" lies on the desk at my hand, 
 and as I open it at random the eye falls on these 
 words from the essay on Dante: "The man behind 
 the verse is far greater than the verse itself, and the 
 impulse he gives to what is deepest and most sacred 
 
142 MY STUDY FIRE. 
 
 in us, though we cannot always explain it, is none 
 the less real and lasting. Some men always seem to 
 remain outside their work ; others make their indi- 
 viduality felt in every part of it — their very life 
 vibrates in every verse, and we do not wonder that 
 it has 'made them lean for many years.' The vir- 
 tue that has gone out of them abides in what they 
 do. The book such a man makes is indeed, as 
 Milton called it, 'the precious life-blood of a mas- 
 ter spirit.' Theirs is a true immortality, for it is 
 their soul, and not their talent, that survives in their 
 work." 
 
 "There," I said, "is the answer to your question 
 from the only person who can speak with authority 
 on that matter. What you feel in that essay on 
 Gray, and what I always feel in reading Lowell, is 
 not the skill of a marvelously trained hand, but the 
 movement of a large, rich nature to whom life speaks 
 through the whole range of experience, and who 
 has met that constant inflow of truth with a quiet 
 nobleness of mind and heart. Mr. Lowell seems to 
 me pre-eminently the man of genius as distinguished 
 from the man of talent ; the man, that is, who holds 
 heart and mind in close, unconscious fellowship 
 with the whole movement of life, as opposed to the 
 man who attempts to get at the heart of these things 
 by intellectual dexterity. The great mass of writ- 
 ing is done by men of talent, and that is the reason 
 why this account of Gray makes what you have been 
 reading lately seem cold and thin. There is in this 
 
THE METHOD OF GENIUS. 143 
 
 essay a vein of gold of which Mr. Lowell is perhaps 
 unconscious; it is the presence of his own nature 
 which gives his piece of criticism that indescrib- 
 able quality which every human soul recognizes at 
 once as a new revelation of itself. 
 
 "The man of talent is simply a trained hand, a 
 dexterity which can be turned at will in any direc- 
 tion ; this is the kind of literary faculty which 
 abounds just now, and is so sure of itself that it 
 denies the very existence of genius. The man of 
 genius, on the other hand, is a large, rich nature, 
 with an ear open to every whisper of human experi- 
 ence, and a heart that interprets the deepest things 
 to itself before they have become conscious in the 
 thought. The man of genius lives deeply, widely, 
 royally; and the best expression he ever gives of 
 himself is but a faint echo of the world-melodies 
 that fill his soul. When such a man writes, he does 
 not draw upon a special fund of information and ob- 
 servation ; the universe of truth lies about him, and 
 rises like an inexhaustible fountain within him. 
 One feels in the work of such a man as Lowell the 
 presence, to use Ruskin's phrase, not of a great 
 effort, but of a great force. There is no sugges- 
 tion of limitation, no hint that one has reached the 
 end of his resources ; on the contrary, there is pres- 
 ent the indefinable atmosphere of an opulent nature, 
 whose wealth is equal to all draughts, and whose 
 capital remains unimpaired by the greatest enter- 
 prises. Shakespeare was not impoverished by 
 
144 MY STUDY FIRE. 
 
 'Hamlet,' nor Goethe by 'Faust.' 'To be able to 
 set in motion the greatest subjects of thought with- 
 out any sense of fatigue,' says Amiel, 'to be greater 
 than the world, to play with one's strength — this is 
 what makes the well-being of intelligence, the Olym- 
 pic festival of thought.' " 
 
 The fire, which had been burning meditatively 
 during this discourse, sank at this point into a bed of 
 glowing coals, and I took breath long enough to re- 
 plenish it with a fresh stick or two. Rosalind mean- 
 while had taken up her sewing. 
 
 "Don't you believe, then, in an art of literature 
 apart from life?" she asked. 
 
 "To begin with," I answered, "there is no such 
 thing as a separation of art from life ; it is modern 
 misconception which not only separates them, but 
 sets them in contrast. A true art is impossible 
 apart from life; the man of genius always restores 
 this lost harmony. The man of talent divorces his 
 skill from life, the man of genius subordinates his 
 training to the truth which speaks through him. 
 To him art is not mere skill, but that perfect repro- 
 duction of ideal life which the world gains when 
 Pheidias gives it the Olympian Zeus, Raphael the 
 Sistine Madonna, and Dante the Divine Comedy. 
 Mr. Lowell is the greatest of our poets because his 
 trained hand moves in such subtle harmony with 
 his noble thought. He wears 'all -that weight of 
 learning lightly as a flower.' The impulses of a 
 man of genius come from life; they are deep, rich, 
 
THE METHOD OF GENIUS. 145 
 
 vital ; they rise out of the invisible depths of his 
 consciousness as the unseen mists rise out of the 
 mighty abyss of the sea ; and as the clouds take 
 form and become the splendor and the nourishment 
 of toiling continents, so do these impulses become 
 distinct and articulate, and touch life at last with 
 an indescribable beauty and strength. On the other 
 hand, the impulses of a man of talent spring from 
 skill, knowledge, the desire and profit of the mo- 
 ment. The deepest truth is not born of conscious 
 striving, but comes in the quiet hour when a noble 
 nature gives itself into the keeping of life, to suffer, 
 to feel, to think, and to act as it is moved by a wis- 
 dom not its own. The product of literary skill is a 
 piece of mechanism — something made and dex- 
 terously put together in the broad light of the work- 
 shop ; the work of genius is always a miracle of 
 growth, hidden from all eyes, nourished and ex- 
 panded by the invisible forces which sustain the 
 universe. ' ' 
 
 At this point I became suddenly conscious that 
 my hobby was in full canter, and that Rosalind 
 might be the unwilling spectator of a solitary race 
 against time. 
 
 "My dear," I said, "your question must bear the 
 responsibility of this discourse. There are some 
 names so rich in associations with one's intellectual 
 life, so suggestive of the best and truest things, that 
 they have a kind of a magical power over our minds; 
 they are open sesames to about all there is in us." 
 
CHAPTER XXIV. 
 
 A HINT FROM THE SEASON. 
 
 This afternoon, when Rosalind came in from her 
 walk, she brought an indefinable atmosphere of 
 spring with her. I was not surprised when she said 
 that she had seen a bluebird ; I should hardly have 
 been surprised if she had told me the summer was 
 at our doors, and the fire must go out that the 
 hearth might be swept and garnished. There are 
 times when prophecy is swiftly fulfilled by the imagin- 
 ation, and turns into history under our very eyes. 
 For days past there have been harbingers of change 
 on every hand; and fancy, taking the clues so 
 magically dropped here and there in field and sky, 
 travels with swift flight onward to the songs and 
 flowers of June. This evening the season has 
 wrought its spell upon us; and while we have listened 
 to the winds of March, and watched the shifting 
 outlines of the fire, our thoughts have caught some- 
 thing of the glow of summer. Rosalind has had 
 various house-cleaning plans running through her 
 mind, no doubt, but she has kept them to herself. 
 I believe in the sharing of cares, but I admire, above 
 all things, the loving skill which reserves the com- 
 mon problems of the household for some fit hour, 
 146 
 
A HINT FROM THE SEASON. 147 
 
 and keeps the evening intact for sweeter and more 
 inspiring fellowship. I sometimes wonder if a good 
 many women do not lose that touch of sentiment 
 which is the fragrance of domestic life, by keeping 
 the machinery too constantly within sight and hear- 
 ing; the whir of the wheels must be deadened if 
 the fireside is to hear the best talk, and to cast its 
 magical glow on the most complete companionship. 
 The supreme charm of a woman is her atmosphere; 
 and how shall that be serene and sunny, touching 
 the life of the home with indefinable color and fra- 
 grance, if problems and perplexities are not kept 
 well in the background? The women whose pres- 
 ence is both rest and inspiration are not as numer- 
 ous as they might be if the secret of their charm 
 were told abroad. This is a digression, but, in the 
 ramble, what moments are so delightful as those 
 in which we stray from the road to pluck a wild 
 flower, or to find a fairer outlook? 
 
 "I am not sure," said Rosalind, "that I should 
 care for perpetual sunshine. One values a beautiful 
 thing most when it appeals to a fresh perception of 
 its charm. I don't believe I should enjoy summer 
 half so much if it were always at hand." 
 
 I was thinking the same thought, but with a dif- 
 ferent application. I had just been reading one of 
 those perverse writers who are always sure that their 
 own age is the worst in all history, and their own 
 country the most depraved in the world. If they 
 would only add that they themselves were the most 
 
148 MY STUDY FIRE. 
 
 misleading of writers, I could offset the truth of 
 the last statement against the falsehood of the other 
 propositions, and feel that something had been 
 gained. The particular prophet to whose monody 
 I had been giving a few moments of half-hearted 
 attention had assured me that we have come to the 
 end of poetry and all great work of the imagination, 
 and have entered upon a period of final decadence. 
 All noble dreams of idealism have faded, and a dull 
 gray sky is henceforth to overarch life and leave it 
 cold and colorless. This pessimistic note is famil- 
 iar to all readers of modern books; they have heard 
 it in all keys, and with all the varied modulations of 
 literary skill. Renan has sung the swan-song of 
 the noble idealism of the past in his limpid and 
 beguiling French periods, and English and Ameri- 
 can pens have taken up the burden of the refrain 
 and set it to a varied and seductive music. The 
 swan-song has become to many sensitive spirits a 
 veritable siren melody, luring them away from all 
 noble effort and action. These thoughts were in 
 my mind as I gave the fire an energetic stirring to 
 express my deep and growing aversion to the gospel 
 of disillusion which is fast substituting for the pro- 
 phetic dream of the imagination the nightmare of 
 despair. 
 
 "I do not understand," I said, as I sank back 
 into my easy-chair, "why men who write books will 
 not occasionally look out of the windows of their 
 libraries and take note of the bluebirds and the 
 
A HINT FROM THE SEASON. 149 
 
 gleams of softened sky. We happen just now to 
 be in a period of comparative barrenness in poetry. 
 We have had within this present century a golden 
 summer of marvelous fertility ; one has to go back 
 a good many seasons to recall another so prodigal 
 of color, so full of all manner of noble fruitage. 
 There has followed a softened but beautiful autumn, 
 the aftermath of a cloudless day; and now has come 
 the inevitable winter of pause, silence, and apparent 
 barrenness. Straightway the older men, recalling 
 the glorious days of their youth, fall to moaning 
 over the final disappearance of summer ; and some 
 of the younger men, chilled by the season and unable 
 to rekindle the torches that have burnt out, join 
 in the tragic chorus, and give themselves to the 
 writing of epitaphs of classical perfection of form 
 and more than classical coldness of temper. There 
 are times when one feels as if most recent poetry 
 had been written solely for mortuary purposes. The 
 chill of death is on it; one's only consolation in 
 reading it springs from the conviction that it is 
 written over an empty tomb; and it must be con- 
 fessed that grief has a hollow sound, even in verse 
 of classical correctness, when one knows that the 
 death which it laments with elegiac elegance has not 
 actually taken place. For myself, I confess I am 
 so weary of the funeral note of recent verse that I 
 have gone back to Shakespeare with an almost rapa- 
 cious appetite. An evening on Prospero's Island, 
 with Ariel hovering in mid-air, the invisible mes- 
 
15° MY STUDY FIRE. 
 
 senger of that Imagination which his master embod- 
 ies, gives me back the old harmonies of hope and 
 joy and life. The music of the sea that sings round 
 that island is heard by few mariners in these melan- 
 choly days. It is significant that the greatest writers 
 are never despondent or despairing. Such men as 
 Homer and Shakespeare and Goethe were serene 
 and joyous in a world whose deeper mysteries were 
 far more real and pressing to them than to the minor 
 singers of to-day. The trouble is not in the age, 
 but in the men. The man who cannot be strong, 
 cheerful, creative, in his own age, would find all 
 other ages inhospitable and barren." 
 
 Here I saw that Rosalind was about to speak, if 
 she could get the opportunity, and I generously 
 gave it to her. 
 
 "I quite agree with you," was her agreeable com- 
 ment; "but what did you mean by saying at the 
 beginning that writers ought to look out of their 
 library windows oftener?" 
 
 "I'm glad you reminded me of my text," I 
 answered. "The point of what I have been saying 
 was in that remark. In the world of thought, 
 imagination, and feeling, seed-time and harvest are 
 ordained quite as distinctly as in the world of fruits 
 and flowers. There are epochs of splendid fertility, 
 and there are epochs of sterility. It is by no acci- 
 dent that one age is silent and the next flooded with 
 melody. The tide of creative impulse ebbs and 
 flows under a law which has not been discovered; 
 
A HINT FROM THE SEASON. 15 1 
 
 but the return of the tide is no less certain than its 
 ebb. Why, then, should men of talent wander up 
 and down a beach from which the waters have 
 receded, wringing their hands and adding a hollow 
 moan to the mighty monotone of the sea because 
 the tide will return no more? More than once, in 
 other and parallel ages, these melancholy cries have 
 been drowned by the incoming tides. Life is inex- 
 haustible, and he must be blind indeed who does 
 not see in the movements of to-day the possibilities 
 of a future in which art shall come nearer than ever 
 to human hearts, and add to its divine revelation of 
 beauty some undiscovered loveliness." 
 
CHAPTER XXV. 
 
 A BED OF EMBERS. 
 
 There is no event in the household life so mo- 
 mentous as the coming of a friend; it is one of the 
 events for which the home was built and in which 
 its ideal is realized. "The ornament of a house," 
 says Emerson, "is the friends who frequent it." 
 Their character, culture, aims, reveal the law of its 
 being; whether it stands for show, for mere luxury, 
 or for large and noble living. "Honor to the house 
 where they are simple to the verge of hardship; so 
 that there the intellect is awake and reads the laws 
 of the universe, the soul worships truth and love, 
 honor and courtesy flow into all deeds." How 
 easy it is to collect handsome furniture and crowd 
 a house to suffocation with things which give one 
 no impression of individuality, but only an impres- 
 sion of expense ! Elaborate homes abound in these 
 days, but for the most part they serve mainly to 
 emphasize the vulgarity of the people who inhabit 
 them ; an elegant house is a dangerous possession 
 for those whose social training has not prepared 
 them for it. Such homes are not without their ad- 
 vantages to the children who grow up in them, but 
 the elders are always out of place in them. The 
 152 
 
A BED OF EMBERS. 153 
 
 real charm of a home is the indefinable atmosphere 
 which pervades it, made up of the personalities who 
 live in it, of the friends who frequent it, of the pic- 
 tures which hang upon its walls, the books which lie 
 upon its tables, and all its furnishings which dis- 
 close taste, training, and character. Many elegant 
 houses impress one with a painful materialism ; even 
 when all things are in keeping there is an elabora- 
 tion which offends the mind by making too much of 
 bodily comfort and mere physical luxury. The 
 highest intellectual and social types are not likely 
 to be developed in such an atmosphere ; Attic rather 
 than Asiatic influences have inspired the finest social 
 life. The first and final impression of a house should 
 come, not from furniture, but from those material 
 things which stand for thought, for beauty, for the 
 ideal. I should shrink from creating a home which 
 people should remember for its ministration to their 
 bodies; that kind of service can be bought at the 
 inn ; I should count myself fortunate if my home 
 were remembered for some inspiring quality of faith, 
 charity, and aspiring intelligence. One cannot 
 write about his own home without egotism, for it is 
 the best part of himself. If I were to write about 
 mine, as I fear I am constantly doing, I should 
 simply write about Rosalind. When I think of 
 what home is and means, I understand the absolute 
 veracity of Lowell's sentiment that "many make 
 the household, but only one the home." In every 
 home there is one whose nature gives law and 
 
154 MY STUDY FIRE. 
 
 beauty to its life; who builds it slowly out of her 
 heart and soul, adorns it with the outward and visi- 
 ble symbols of her own inward and spiritual gifts, 
 and makes it her own by ministrations not to be 
 weighed and counted, so impalpable, so numberless, 
 and so beyond all price are they. But of the friends 
 who pull one's latch-string and sit before one's fire 
 one may speak without offense and with infinite 
 satisfaction to himself; the coming and going of 
 those who know and love us best form the most in- 
 spiring records in the domestic chronicles. 
 
 Last night the study fire burned late ; or rather 
 we sat by it so late that it was only a bed of embers. 
 What a glow came from it, and what heat! The 
 blaze of the earlier evening yielded nothing so grate- 
 ful, so beautiful, so full of appeal to the memory 
 and the imagination. We lingered long, and with 
 deepening joy and gratitude; we seemed to pause 
 for an hour between a past rich in memories and a 
 future affluent in hopes. We waited for our friend 
 to speak, and every time her voice broke the silence 
 it seemed to recall some half-forgotten phase of a 
 life set to pure and beautiful ends, some trait of a 
 nature full of a sweet strength of mind and heart : 
 
 " A soul serene, Madonna-like, enshrined 
 In her dear self." 
 
 The embers glowed with a soft and genial heat 
 which seemed to make the exchange of confidences 
 between us easy and natural. Even with those who 
 
A BED OF EMBERS. 155 
 
 stand nearest to us we can never force one of those 
 interchanges of thought which mark the very best 
 moments of our lives ; they must grow out of the 
 occasion and the mood, and they sometimes elude 
 our most patient endeavors. In the story of ' 'Faust" 
 Goethe undoubtedly meant to say, among other 
 things, that a man does not own his soul; he can- 
 not barter it for any price, because it belongs to 
 God. It is certain that the deeper self which we 
 call the soul does not hold itself at our beck and 
 call. There are hours when it is inaccessible, 
 although we make strenuous effort to reach it; 
 when it is dumb, although we urge it to speak. But 
 at the moment when we least expect such happiness, 
 it suddenly reveals itself to us, and to that other 
 whose atmosphere, whose gift or grace or accent, 
 has somehow won its confidence and inspired it 
 with utterance. There have been moments like this 
 in our history which seem to be, as we look back, 
 the real events in our lives — those events which have 
 made us acquainted with our own natures, and held 
 open the door of life at the same time. The glow- 
 ing embers sent a warm thrill into our very hearts, 
 and in that warmth our thoughts seemed to flow 
 together. Then, for the first time, I understood 
 the real sentiment of that residuum of fire and heat 
 which the flame leaves behind it. The heart of the 
 fire survives the perishing of the material which fed 
 it; that has vanished, but its soul of heat and light 
 remains, a beautiful afterglow. In some kindred 
 
156 MY STUDY FIRE. 
 
 sense friendship is the survival of the perishable 
 element of the years that are gone ; actions, experi- 
 ences, words, are mostly forgotten, but the trust, 
 faith, affection, that grew out of and through these 
 remain to give light and warmth to the later time. 
 The past that has burned out, like the flame of 
 the earlier evening, survives in these glowing em- 
 bers, radiating heat and light. 
 
 As the embers form the residuum of that which 
 is gone, so do they make the surest foundation for 
 future activity and beauty. I have but to lay a 
 few sticks across these coals, and immediately the 
 blaze is kindled ; there lies the compressed force of 
 fire. There are hearths on which the glow never 
 dies; it is kindled and rekindled day after day, until 
 it becomes a continuous fire from season's end to 
 season's end. Like the ancient hearth-fires from 
 which the Greek emigrants carried embers when 
 they parted from the overcrowded community, these 
 fires light each new day and each succeeding month 
 with something from the warmth and glow of the 
 day and the month that are gone. Friendship 
 carries into the future whatever was best and truest 
 in our past relationships ; whatever could be de- 
 tached from the perishable forms in which our lives 
 express and manifest themselves. Each year adds 
 to the accumulations of the past, and levels still 
 more those invisible walls which separate us. The 
 solitude of life is known to us all ; for the most part 
 we are alone, and the voices of friends come only 
 
A BED OF EMBERS. 157 
 
 faint and broken across the impassable gulfs which 
 surround every human soul. No one has felt the 
 pathos of this solitude more keenly or given it 
 a more deeply poetic expression than Matthew- 
 Arnold : 
 
 "Yes ! in the sea of life enisled, 
 
 With echoing straits between us thrown, 
 Dotting the shoreless watery wild, 
 
 We mortal millions live alone. 
 The islands feel the enclasping flow, 
 And then their endless bounds they know. 
 
 "But when the moon their hollows lights, 
 And they are swept by balms of spring, 
 And in their glens, on stariy nights, 
 
 The nightingales divinely sing ; 
 And lovely notes, from shore to shore, 
 Across the sounds and channels pour — 
 
 " Oh ! then a longing like despair 
 
 Is to their farthest caverns sent ; 
 For surely once, they feel, we were 
 
 Parts of a single continent ! 
 Now round us spreads the watery plain — 
 Oh, might our marges meet again ! 
 
 "Who order'd that their longing's fire 
 
 Should be, as soon as kindled, cool'd ? 
 Who renders vain their deep desire ? 
 
 A God, a God their severance ruled ! 
 And bade betwixt their shores to be 
 The unplumbed, salt, estranging sea." 
 
 The moods in which the sense of kinship out- 
 weighs the sense of isolation, when the balms of 
 
IS 8 MY STUDY FIRE. 
 
 spring are in the air, and in the solitudes a divine 
 music is heard, come oftenest at the bidding of the 
 friend who has journeyed with us in the day of 
 action, and bivouacked with us when the night of 
 sorrow has fallen upon us, swift and awful, from the 
 shining skies. There are those who were born to be 
 our kinsmen of the soul, and whose voice reaches us 
 when all other voices fail, "For the rest, which we 
 commonly call friends and friendships," says the 
 wise Montaigne, "are nothing but acquaintance, 
 and familiarities, either occasionally contracted or 
 by some design, by means of which there happens 
 some little intercourse betwixt our souls: but in the 
 friendship I speak of, they mix and work themselves 
 into one piece, with so universal a mixture that there 
 is no more sign of the seam by which they were first 
 conjoined. If a man should importune me to give 
 a reason why I loved him, I find it could no other- 
 wise be exprest than by making answer, because it 
 was he, because it was I. There is beyond I am 
 able to say, I know not what inexplicable and fatal 
 power that brought on this union." 
 
 As we say good-night we carefully cover the em- 
 bers with ashes, which no longer signify desolation, 
 but the husbanding of the fire for to-morrow's cheer 
 and warmth. Friendship is always prophetic of the 
 morrow; its past is prophecy and promise of the 
 morrow. 
 
CHAPTER XXVI. 
 
 A DAY OUT OF DOORS. 
 
 As I sit looking into the study-fire my glance 
 rests on a pair of snow-shoes on the broad chimney 
 breast, and straightway fancy flies abroad and recalls 
 a glorious day of winter cheer and exploit. 
 
 A writer of deep suggestiveness has commented on 
 the superior advantages of the man on horseback 
 over the man on foot; but this exalted condition, 
 which in certain seasons gives one a delicious sense 
 of sovereignty, affords neither advantage nor charm 
 in the northern climate in midwinter. The man to 
 whom all things are possible under these circum- 
 stances is the man en snow-shoes. He alone holds 
 the key of the snow-beleaguered forests; to him 
 alone is intrusted the right of eminent domain — the 
 privilege, in other words, of seizing for his own 
 use the lands of his neighbors; he alone owns the 
 landscape. Great privileges never go save in com- 
 pany with grave responsibilities, and not unfre- 
 quently with serious perils. No one need expect, 
 therefore, to be put into possession of the landscape 
 except upon conditions more or less formidable. 
 The snow-shoe is a delightful feature of decoration ; 
 
 159 
 
160 MY STUDY FIRE. 
 
 how often have we seen it effectively displayed 
 against a proper background, and straightway, as if 
 a door had been set ajar into another clime, the 
 breath of winter has been upon us, the splendor of 
 illimitable fields of snow has blinded us, and we 
 have seen in a glance the dark line of spruce and 
 fire as it climbs the white peak against the deep 
 blue horizon line. But the snow-shoe has its serious 
 and even humiliating aspects. The novice who ties 
 it on his moccasin and goes forth for the first time 
 in rash and exulting confidence is likely to meet 
 with swift and calamitous eclipse. He mounts the 
 first inviting drift of beautiful snow, only to dis- 
 appear in a humiliation and perplexity from which 
 he emerges blinded, breathless, and whiter than the 
 Polar bear. The unsympathetic jeers of his com- 
 panions complete the discipline and stimulate to 
 further catastrophes, which in the end work out the 
 peaceful results of wisdom and training. But the 
 secret once learned, snow-shoeing is thenceforth a 
 measureless delight. 
 
 Thoreau declares that in one sense we cannot live 
 too leisurely. "Let me not live as if time was 
 short. Catch the pace of the seasons, have leisure 
 to attend to every phenomenon of nature, and to 
 entertain every thought that comes to you. Let your 
 life be a leisurely progress through the volumes of 
 nature ..." To thoroughly enter into the life of 
 nature one must accept her mood at the moment, 
 and she has as many moods as the mortals who seek 
 
A DAY OUT OF DOORS. i6l 
 
 her companionship ; but with all her moods she is 
 never moody. On a summer's day the spacious 
 leisure of the forest invites one to complete cessa- 
 tion of effort ; to that profound repose which sets 
 every door ajar for fresh perceptions and new influ- 
 ences. But on a clear, cold winter's morning a 
 very different spirit is abroad ; not repose, but inten- 
 sity of action, is solicited. There lies the great 
 world, from which the traces of individual owner- 
 ship have been almost obliterated ; who will claim 
 it, and enforce his claim with absolute possession? 
 It is in response to this inspiring challenge that 
 the man on snow-shoes enters the field. If he is 
 made of the right stuff he has the air of a great pro- 
 prietor To him roads and fences and all artificial 
 boundary lines are as if they were not ; he owns the 
 landscape, and there are moments when he feels as if 
 the sky had been hung above his wide, free world 
 to give him the last and most delicate sensation of 
 adventure. The great joy of the man on snow- 
 shoes is the consciousness of freedom. He is 
 released frcm the tyranny of the roads and the 
 impertinent intrusion of fences; places that were 
 once forbidden or inaccessible are now open to him; 
 fields given over to the selfishness of agriculture are 
 leased to nature for the nobler uses of beauty and 
 his personal adventure ; there is no secluded pond 
 in the woods to which he cannot choose his own 
 path; there is no remote outlook across field or 
 swamp to which he cannot swiftly make his way. 
 
1 62 MY STUDY FIRE. 
 
 The great drifts, the long levels of snow in the open 
 places, are so many exhilarating opportunities to 
 him, and he accepts the invitation of nature to come 
 abroad with her not as an inferior but as an equal. 
 
 The snow-shoe is ingeniously devised to diffuse 
 man's ponderosity over a larger surface; to enable 
 him to go by artifice where the natural construction 
 of his body would forbid his going. This well 
 devised aid to escape from civilization sets free the 
 mind at the same time that it removes a physical 
 limitation. The man who cannot get away from 
 himself on snow-shoes is a galley slave who deserves 
 the oar and will never escape from it. But most 
 men who find themselves afield so equipped cast off 
 all bondage of mind to old habits and limitations by 
 an effort so natural that it is purely unconscious. 
 They are filled with an insatiable desire to take deep 
 breaths, to penetrate every recess of the world about 
 them, to overcome every obstacle and leave nothing 
 untried. In the vigorous morning air all enterprises 
 are open, and one waits neither to count the hours 
 nor the difficulties. The earth shines like the sky, 
 and a kind of ineffable splendor crowns the day. 
 Level field and rolling meadow, stretch of lowland 
 and sweep of mountain, unbroken surface of lake 
 and curving whiteness of river losing itself behind 
 the hills — all these lie within the vision and invite 
 exploration. The dark green masses of pine and 
 spruce rest the eye dazzled by the universal bril- 
 liancy. The mountains have a marvelous delicacy 
 
A DAY OUT OF DOORS. 163 
 
 and charm ; instead of presenting a flat surface of 
 dead white they reveal a thousand soft and rounded 
 outlines ; each tree is individualized and stands out 
 in clear and perfect symmetry, and every branch 
 and leaf is white with exquisite frost work. At 
 sunset, when the last tender light of the winter day 
 falls on those deep, rich masses of frost tracery, one 
 will see a vanishing loveliness as tender as the flush 
 of the rose leaf and as ethereal as the light of a 
 solitary star when it first touches the edges of the 
 hills. The day ends in Hesperian splendor. 
 
 But, fortunately, the day is still in its prime, and, 
 as one chooses the deepest drift and climbs to the 
 top of the nearest hill, he wishes it might never 
 end. Arrived at the summit, breathless and exul- 
 tant, he looks for the hollow which has caught the 
 drifts, and, after a moment's rest, he runs swiftly 
 down to the pond below, sliding on the crusts, and 
 moving more slowly and cautiously over light snow 
 of whose depth and yielding quality he has perhaps 
 already had sad experience. The level surface of 
 the pond lacks that variety which is the charm of 
 snow-shoeing, and so one skirts the shore and takes 
 the first accessible opening into the woods; and 
 now delight and danger are mixed in the most delici- 
 ous compound. The remoteness, the silence, and 
 the solitude of the winter woods are simply enchant- 
 ing; the sky is softly blue between the "bare, 
 ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang"; 
 every twig is snow-bound, and the only evidence of 
 
164 MY STUDY FIRE. 
 
 life is the track of the rabbit or the fox. One 
 tramps on, jubilant and self-forgetful, until suddenly 
 some unseen root catches in the interstices of the 
 snow-shoe, and then alas for human greatness ! But 
 the disaster is only momentary — is, indeed, part of 
 the novel and fascinating experience. On and on 
 through the deep recesses of the forest one makes his 
 way, and at every turn some lovely or impressive 
 wintry scene frames itself for permanent hanging in 
 the memory. Now it is a little snow covered hol- 
 low where one is sure the mosses grow thick in 
 summer; now it is a solitary tree whose tracery of 
 branches is exquisitely etched against the sky ; now 
 it is a side hill swiftly descending to the narrow 
 brook, the music of whose running still lingers softly 
 cadenced in the ear of memory ; now it is a sudden 
 glimpse of the mountains that rise in the wide 
 silence and solitude like primeval altars whose lofty 
 fires are lighted at sunrise and sunset ; and now, as 
 one leaves the forest behind, the last picture is the 
 river winding through the dark, wild mountain 
 gorge, its waters rushing impatient and tumultuous 
 over the ice that strives in vain to fetter them. 
 
 The short day is already hurrying to its close ; 
 but its brevity has no power over the memories one 
 has plucked from wood and field. Reluctantly one 
 hurries homeward. The smoke from the little vil- 
 lage in the hollow rises in straight white lines above 
 every house, and as one pauses for a moment, 
 before descending, to take in the picture, one recalls 
 
 < 
 
 !-. 
 
 i. 
 
A DAY OUT OF DOORS. 165 
 
 a similar moment of which Thoreau has preserved 
 the fleeting impression: "The windows on the 
 skirts of the village reflect the setting sun with 
 intense brilliancy, a dazzling glitter, it is so cold. 
 Standing thus on one side of the hill, I begin to see 
 a pink light reflected from the snow about fifteen 
 minutes before the sun sets. This gradually deepens 
 to purple and violet in some places, and the pink is 
 very distinct, especially when, after looking at the 
 simply white snow on other sides, you turn your 
 eyes to the hill. Even after all direct sunlight is 
 withdrawn from the hill-top, as well as from the 
 valley in which you stand, you see, if you are pre- 
 pared to discern it, a faint and delicate tinge of 
 purple and violet there. " But the vanishing beauty 
 of this hour eludes even the pencil of Thoreau, and as 
 you take off your snow-shoes you are aware that you 
 have become the possessor of a day which you will 
 always long to share with others, but the memory of 
 which, in spite of all your efforts toward expression, 
 will remain incommunicable. 
 
CHAPTER XXVII. 
 
 BESIDE THE ISIS. 
 
 There is a willful spirit in the study-fire which 
 eludes all attempts to make it the servant of human 
 moods and habits. It is gay and even boisterous 
 on days when it ought to be melancholy, and it is 
 despondent at times when it ought to be cheerful. 
 
 There is much that is akin to human thought in 
 it, and there is much that is alien ; for the wild, free 
 life of the woods blazes and sings in its flames. Its 
 glow rests now on one and now on another of the 
 objects that lie within its magic circle; one day it 
 seems to seek the poet's corner, and lingers with a 
 kind of bright and merry tenderness about those rows 
 of shining names; on other days it makes its home 
 with the travelers, as if in fancy mingling its softer 
 radiance with the fiery brightness of the desert, or 
 breaking a little the gloom of the arctic night. Some- 
 times it lies soft and warm on one of the two or 
 three faces that hang on the study walls; on the 
 old poet whose memory lends a deep and beautiful 
 interest to one of the quaintest of Old World towns ; 
 or on the keen, pure face of one so modern and 
 American that, although the cadence of the pine 
 166 
 
BESIDE THE ISIS. 167 
 
 breaks the silence where he sleeps, he is still so far 
 in advance of us that we cannot call ourselves his 
 contemporaries. To-day it rests contentedly on a bit 
 of landscape to which one's imagination goes out in 
 these springs days as to one of those enchanting 
 places which are its visible homes. It is a glimpse 
 of the garden of New College at Oxford, with the 
 beautiful Magdalen tower in the distance; the 
 venerable trees, the stretch of velvety sward, the 
 ivy-covered gate in the foreground. As the eye 
 rests upon it memory fills in the imperfect picture; 
 the bit of the old city wall hidden by the dense 
 masses of ivy, the walk shadowed by ancient trees, 
 the sculptured walls of the College — these rise on the 
 inward vision under the spell of this glimpse of the 
 venerable town on the Isis. And with them comes 
 that which no visible portraiture can represent ; the 
 Old World silence and peace, the ripe loveliness, 
 the brooding presence of ancient memories ! One 
 feels here the deepest spell of that history which, 
 although localized on an alien continent, is still the 
 background of his own life ; that history which lives 
 in names as familiar as the names of those who stand 
 nearest us, in thoughts that are our constant com- 
 panions, in words whose music is never silent in our 
 memory. Melancholy indeed must be the lot of 
 one who could sit under these ancient trees in this 
 ancient world, where nature and art conspired cen- 
 turies ago to lay eye and imagination under a com- 
 mon spell, and not feel himself in some sense one 
 
1 68 MY STUDY FIRE. 
 
 of the heirs of this incomparable inheritance be- 
 queathed by history, art, and scholarship to this 
 busy, changing modern world. From the day, now 
 more than five centuries past, when the princely 
 generosity of that princely scholar and man, William 
 of Wykeham, opened the noble quadrangle of New 
 College to "seventy scholars studying in the facul- 
 ties," to this spring day, when the limes are green 
 and the soft April skies spread over spire and tower, 
 this place has been sacred to the "things of the 
 mind." 
 
 To recall the names of the Oxford scholars, from 
 Roger Bacon and Wyclif to Jowett and Pattison, is 
 to revive the most splendid traditions of English 
 learning, and to traverse step by step the great 
 stages of the intellectual growth of the modern 
 world: medievalism, with its kindred scholasticism ; 
 the Renaissance, with its ardent teachers of the new 
 learning; the Reformation, whose visible witness to 
 liberty and conscience stands in St. Giles Street; 
 the broad, rich movement of recent scholarship 
 associated with a score of famous names. One may 
 look through Mr. Hogg's eyes into Shelley's rooms 
 in University College, where the slight, shy poet 
 carries on his chemical experiments, or watch him 
 when on Magdalen Bridge he abruptly snatches a 
 baby from its mother's arms to interrogate it con- 
 cerning pre-existence; or take note of Addison 
 meditating under the elms by the Cherwell ; or of 
 Johnson in his poor chamber in Pembroke Gate 
 
BESIDE THE ISIS. 169 
 
 tower ; or study the faces of Wolsey and Gladstone 
 as they hang in the hall of Christ Church ; or 
 strive to recall, in the week-day solitude of St. 
 Mary's, the spell of those sermons spoken sixty years 
 ago from its pulpit by one of the masters of English 
 speech, who has been also a master of the things of 
 the spirit. One may find all shrines of ancient 
 worship and consult all spirits of ancient wisdom in 
 this beautiful city, "so venerable, so lovely, so un- 
 ravaged by the fierce intellectual life of our century, 
 so serene!" Well might the poet and scholar who 
 loved her and honored her with his own delicate 
 genius, his own manly independence, add: "And 
 yet, steeped in sentiment as she lies, spreading her 
 gardens to the moonlight, and whispering from her 
 towers the last enchantments of the Middle Age, 
 who will deny that Oxford, by her ineffable charm 
 keeps ever calling us nearer to the true goal of all 
 of us, to the ideal, to perfection — to beauty, in a 
 word, which is only truth seen from another side?" 
 There are glimpses everywhere which lure one 
 away from this lovely garden of New College; in 
 every quadrangle there are associations with great 
 names. But if one is in a meditative mood, he will 
 be loth to exchange the silence of this venerable 
 garden for the magnificence of the Christ Church 
 quadrangles or for the noble vista of High Street, 
 which Hawthorne long ago pronounced the most 
 impressive street in England. The spell of Oxford 
 is in the air, and one comes under it most entirely 
 
170 MY STUDY FIRE. 
 
 when he loiters in one of these ancient fastnesses 
 of the beautiful English verdure. As one waits on 
 the genius of the place, one recalls the words of 
 the pure and noble scholar whose life and thought 
 have been an education to his country. No modern 
 man has valued scholarship more intelligently and 
 justly than Emerson. His life was given to its pur- 
 suits, and his work, singularly free from the intru- 
 sion of the processes and terminology of scholarship, 
 is ripe with its wisdom and weighty in expression 
 of its large results. "A scholar, " said Emerson, 
 "is the favorite of heaven and earth, the excellency 
 of his country, the happiest of men. His duties lead 
 him directly into the holy ground where other men's 
 aspirations only point. His successes are occasions 
 of the purest joy to all men." Never were truer 
 words written; the world does not reward its 
 scholars as it rewards those who achieve more 
 practical or more striking and picturesque successes, 
 but in its heart it honors them and recognizes, by 
 instinct if not by intelligence, that they are the 
 ministers of its noblest interests. Those only who 
 have had a share, however small, in the pursuit of 
 knowledge for its own sake know how engrossing 
 the pursuit is, and how all other forms of activity 
 lose interest in comparison with it. There is for 
 all such minds an irresistible fascination in the 
 scholar's work; a spell which makes the years one 
 long preoccupation, and life an intense and insati- 
 able hunger for more light and truth. The pedant 
 
BESIDE THE ISIS. 17* 
 
 deals with the husks of things, but the scholar deals 
 with the great realities which are disclosed and 
 expressed in the vast range of human knowledge. 
 He lives continually in the great moments and with 
 the great minds; he escapes the limitations of the 
 passing hour into the great past or into the larger 
 movement of his own time. The noblest works of 
 the noblest men are his habitual companions, and 
 he looks upon life with eyes which distinguish its 
 main currents from its conflicting and momentary 
 eddies. 
 
 Here, within these ivy-clad walls, with this vision 
 of mediaeval towers and turrets and spires, embo- 
 somed in a quiet in which great voices seem to be 
 hushed, one believes with Emerson that the scholar 
 is the most fortunate of men. One recalls the ripe 
 and fruitful seekers after truth who have lived and 
 died in these peaceful retreats ; pacing year after 
 year these shaded walks, working in the libraries, 
 meditating by the mullioned windows with all the 
 magical beauty of Oxford spread out before them. 
 Was it not Hawthorne who wished that he had one 
 life to spend entirely in Oxford. In this enchant- 
 ing "home of lost causes and impossible loyalties" 
 one could easily imagine himself becalmed forever; 
 always meaning to break the charm and return to 
 the turbulent world not two hours away, and yet 
 always postponing the final parting to a morrow 
 which never comes. 
 
 From the reverie into which the firelight on the 
 
I7 2 MY STUDY FIRE. 
 
 bit of landscape has lured me insensibly, I awake to 
 find the fire dying and the sky splendid with the 
 midnight stars. The towers of Oxford have become 
 once more a memory, but that which gives them 
 their most enduring charm may be here as well as 
 there ; for here no less than beside the Isis one may 
 love scholarship and pursue it, one may hold to 
 the things of the mind against all the temptations of 
 materialism, one may live his own life of thought. 
 
CHAPTER XXVIII. 
 
 A WORD FOR IDLENESS. 
 
 The study fire is sometimes so potent a solicita- 
 tion to reverie that I ask myself whether it be not a 
 subtle kind of temptation. Even when a man has 
 cleared himself of the cant of the day, as Carlyle 
 would put it, and delivered himself of the American 
 illusion that every hour not devoted to ' 'doing some- 
 thing" is an hour wasted, the inherited instinct is 
 still strong enough to make a faint appeal to con- 
 science. Those active, aggressive words, "doing" 
 and "getting," have so long usurped the greater 
 part of the space in our vocabulary that we use the 
 words being and growing with a little uncertainty; 
 most of us are not entirely at ease with them yet. 
 One of the highest uses of literature is the aid it 
 gives us in securing something like harmony of life — 
 a just balance between the faculties which are 
 developed by practical affairs and those which need 
 the ampler air of intellectual movement. Litera- 
 ture is the mute but eloquent witness forever testify- 
 ing to the reality and power of ideas and ideals. 
 Every great poem is a revelation of that invisible 
 world of beauty in which all may claim citizenship, 
 i73 
 
174 MY STUDY FIRE. 
 
 but in which those alone abide who are rich in their 
 own natures; a world in which no activity is valued 
 by the stir it makes, and no achievement measured 
 by the noise which accompanies it. 
 
 When I recall these things, I perceive that the 
 study fire is helping me to be true to myself when 
 it gently lures me on to reverie and meditation. 
 There is a vast difference between being busy and 
 being fruitful. Busy people are often painfully 
 barren and uninteresting. Their activity expends 
 itself in small mechanical ways that add nothing to 
 the sum of human knowledge or happiness. On 
 the other hand, people who are apparently idle, who 
 seem to be detached from the working world, are 
 often the most fruitful. Our standards of work and 
 idleness are in sad need of revision — a revision which 
 shall substitute character for mere activity, and 
 measure worth and achievement by the depth and 
 richness of nature disclosed. The prior of the 
 Carmelite convent at Frankfort described Giordano 
 Bruno as a man always "walking up and down, filled 
 with fantastic meditations upon new things." In 
 the judgment of the busy people of his time, Bruno, 
 although by no means devoid of energy, was pro- 
 bably accounted an idler. His occupations were 
 different from theirs, and therefore, of course, to 
 be condemned; "so runs the world away. " But 
 time, which has corrected so many inadequate judg- 
 ments, has overruled the decision of Bruno's crit- 
 ics ; they have ceased with their works, but those 
 
A WORD FOR IDLENESS. 1 75 
 
 "fantastic meditations" have somehow sustained 
 their interest, and there now stands on the Campo 
 de' Fiori at Rome a statue of the scholar whose 
 walking up and down attracted the attention of the 
 Carmelite prior three centuries ago and more. In 
 these apparently inactive hours of meditation great 
 thoughts rise out of the silent deep over which a 
 man broods inactive and absorbed. 
 
 Balzac was a prodigious worker. Measured by 
 the standard he set, the real toil of most people 
 who account themselves busy shrinks to very small 
 dimensions. A kind of demoniac energy seized the 
 great novelist when a new work lay clear in his 
 mind, drove him off the boulevard, locked him in 
 his working room, and held him there in almost 
 solitary confinement until the novel was written, 
 and the novelist emerged worn, exhausted, and 
 reduced to a shadow of his former self. This an- 
 guish of toil — for work so intense and continuous is 
 nothing less than anguish — was prolonged through 
 years, and the fruit of it fills several shelves in our 
 book-cases; and yet the highest work which Balzac 
 did was not done in those solitary and painful days 
 when the fever of composition was on him ; it was 
 done in the long, apparently idle hours which he 
 spent on the boulevards, and at the cafes. In 
 those hours his keen and powerful mind was receiv- 
 ing impressions, collecting facts, observing men, 
 drinking in the vast movement of life which went 
 on about him and in which every social condition, 
 
176 MY STUDY FIRE. 
 
 every phase of character, every process of moral 
 advance or decay, was revealed. These meditative 
 hours, in which the hands were idle that the mind 
 might have freest range and the imagination unin- 
 terrupted play, were the creative periods; in them 
 great works were planned, developed, shaped. 
 They were the real working hours of the novelist, 
 who displayed on an immense canvas the France of 
 his day. 
 
 One can imagine as he studies the face of Shakes- 
 peare or of Goethe, charged with the very spirit of 
 meditation, what long and inspiring hours of thought, 
 of deep brooding upon the mystery of the soul, lay 
 behind the works of these masters of man and his 
 life. Out of this profound silence, in which the 
 soul opened itself, hushed and reverential, to the 
 lessons of time and eternity, the great works grew 
 as the tree and the flower spring out of the hidden 
 places of the soil. Men of affluent nature, to 
 whom thought brings its solemn revelations, and on 
 the unseen horizon of whose souls the light of the 
 imagination glows like sunrise on new and undis- 
 covered worlds, live in this mood of meditation — 
 the mother of all the glorious works of art and litera- 
 ture which inspire and sustain us. These hours 
 in which no activity breaks the current of thought 
 are the creative periods; hours solemn with that 
 kinship with Deity which comes when the eye dis- 
 cerns the path of the divine thought, or sees with 
 prophetic vision the image of that beauty with which 
 
A WORD FOR IDLENESS. 177 
 
 all created things are suffused. The deepest life is 
 as silent as the soil out of which the glory of sum- 
 mer bursts ; all noble activities issue from it, and 
 no great work is ever done save by those who have 
 lived in the repose which precedes creation. 
 
 12 
 
CHAPTER XXIX. 
 "the bliss of solitude." 
 
 When I looked out of the study window this 
 morning, and saw the wide stretch of country to the 
 distant hills covered with drifting snow, which a 
 fierce and wilful wind carried hither and thither in 
 whirling clouds like vagrant wraiths, I knew what 
 Emerson meant when he wrote that fine line about 
 the "tumultuous privacy of storm." Wind and 
 snow bar all the gates to-day with invisible bolts ; 
 the village is as remote and detached as if it were 
 on another continent. Across all the avenues of 
 communication is written "no thoroughfare"; the 
 road through the woods will remain for hours with- 
 out a disturbing wheel, and with no traveler save 
 the shy wild dwellers of the place, glad of this sud- 
 den barricade against human intrusion. On the 
 hearth, as if answering the shouts of the riotous 
 wind down the chimney, the fire burns with un- 
 wonted cheeriness. 
 
 Qn such a morning, when nature takes matters 
 
 in her own hands and locks the doors of ingress and 
 
 egress without so much as saying "by your lea^e, " 
 
 one settles down to a day of meditation and reading 
 
 178 
 
" THE BLISS OF SOLITUDE." 1 79 
 
 with peculiar and un qualified satisfaction . No hand 
 will let the knocker fall, with resounding clangor, 
 at the very moment when you have completely 
 lost yourself in some beautiful country of the soul — 
 some distant island where Prospero still holds his 
 unburied rod and reads in his unsunken books; 
 some valley of Avalon, where the apple blossoms 
 still rain the sweetness of perennial summer on the 
 mailed hand of chivalry. Best of all, no disquiet- 
 ing voice of duty will call persistently from some 
 remote quarter; you have been bolted and barred 
 against the intrusion even of your conscience. So 
 lodged, one may give himself up to the solitude of 
 the day without any other feeling than that of repose 
 and delight. Happy is he whom life offers the gift 
 of solitude; that gift which makes so many other 
 gifts available ! Happy is he to whom with books 
 and the love of meditation there is also given the 
 repose, the quiet, the isolation which are the very 
 breath of the life of thought! We are swift to 
 praise heroism and self-denial when these take on 
 striking forms and appeal to the eye or the imagina- 
 tion ; but how infrequent is our recognition of that 
 noble resignation which takes the form of quiet ac- 
 ceptance of limitations which separate one from the 
 work of his heart and divide him from the joy of his 
 life! 
 
 Happy are they, however, to whom solitude 
 brings its deep and satisfying joy — the joy of fel- 
 lowship with great souls, of companionship with 
 
l8o MY STUDY FIRE. 
 
 nature in that sublime communion which Aubrey 
 De Vere describes as "one long mystic colloquy be- 
 tween the twin-born powers, whispering together of 
 immortality" ; of quiet brooding over one's thought; 
 of the rapture of the imagination detaching itself 
 from the world of habit and work, and breathing 
 the ampler ether of the great Idealisms. Nothing 
 redeems a life from the barrenness of continued 
 activity so completely as a stream of deep, silent 
 meditation running under all one's work, and rising 
 into light when the day of solitude comes round. 
 It has been said of Shakespeare that his face bears 
 the marks of habitual meditation ; there is visible 
 in it the calmness and fullness of a mind forever 
 brooding over the deep things of life ; steadied by 
 contemplation of the unfathomable gulfs beneath, 
 uplifted by vision of the shining heights above, 
 calmed and held in poise by familiarity with the 
 unmeasured forces which play about us. 
 
 There is no shirking of common duties, no self- 
 indulgence, in this separation from our fellows. 
 The Irishman who defined solitude as "being alone 
 with one's sweetheart" was not so far out of the 
 way as he seems at the first blush. For the solitude 
 that is a necessity to thoughtful natures is not isola- 
 tion ; it is separation from the stress and turmoil of 
 the world. Wordsworth's life at Grasmere was a 
 life of solitude, but not a solitary life ; on the con- 
 trary, it was enriched and ministered to by the 
 most intimate and devoted companionship. That 
 
" THE BLISS OF SOLITUDE:' 181 
 
 companionship did not introduce new and contra- 
 dictory influences in the poet's life; it brought no 
 pressure of other and diverse aims and ideals to 
 bear on his work. It confirmed and inspired him 
 by constant and pervading sympathy. His days 
 were spent in solitude, without solitariness or isola- 
 tion ; the atmosphere of his fireside was not differ- 
 ent from that which reigned among the hills in those 
 long hours when the poet paced to and fro along his 
 garden paths, chanting his own lines in low mono- 
 tone. 
 
 There is nothing more delightful about the study 
 fire than the sense of congenial solitude which it 
 conveys — the solitude of quiet, reposeful hours, 
 "far from the madding crowd's ignoble strife." 
 The world must be with us, but not too much with 
 us, if we would gain that calm, complete mastery 
 of ourselves which marks full intellectual stature. 
 No large-minded man reviles the world; he knows 
 its uses and value too well for that ; it is the cramped, 
 narrow, or morbid natures who seek complete isola- 
 tion, and in the little circle of their own individu- 
 alism find that satisfaction which comes to men of 
 larger mold only from free and inspiring contact 
 with the whole order of things of which they are 
 part. It is not rejection of society, but wise and 
 right use of it, which characterizes the man who lives 
 most richly in the things of the mind. One finds 
 in solitude only that which he takes into it; it gives 
 nothing save the conditions most favorable to growth. 
 
152 MY STUDY FIRE. 
 
 The quiet hours before one's fire, with one's books 
 at hand ; the long ramble along the woodland road — 
 these make one free to brood over the thoughts that 
 come unbidden, to follow them step by step to their 
 unseen goals, and to drink in the subtle and invisi- 
 ble influences of the hour when one gives one's self 
 / up to it. There is nothing in all the rich and deep 
 experience of life so full of quiet joy, so freighted 
 with the revelations of the things we seek with com- 
 pletest sincerity, as these pauses of solitude in the 
 ceaseless stir and movement of the world. 
 
CHAPTER XXX. 
 
 A NEW HEARTH. 
 
 In most men there is a native conservatism; 
 even those who are progressive and radical in their 
 view of things in general are stanch defenders of old 
 habits and familiar places. The man who has his 
 doubts about absolute private ownership will hesi- 
 tate long before cutting down some old-time tree 
 whose beauty decay is fast changing into ugliness, 
 or giving up the inconvenient and narrow home of 
 childhood for more ample and attractive quarters. 
 We cling to old things by instinct, and because they 
 have been a part of our lives. When Rosalind and 
 myself began talking about a new and ampler hearth 
 for the study fire, the prospect, although alluring 
 was not without its shadows. There was not only 
 the consciousness of the surrender of delightful 
 associations, but the thought of the newness to be 
 made old and the coldness to be made warm. A 
 fresh hearth has no sentiment until the fire has 
 roared up the wide- throated chimney on windy 
 nights, no associations until its glow has fallen 
 on a circle of familiar faces. 
 
 But how soon the strange becomes familiar, and 
 183 
 
1 84 MY STUDY FIRE. 
 
 that which was detached from all human fellowship 
 takes on the deeper interest and profounder mean- 
 ing of human life ! Rosalind had barely lighted the 
 fire on the new hearth before the room seemed fa- 
 miliar and homelike. The bit of driftwood which 
 the children laid on at a later stage was really needed 
 to give a suggestion of something strange and for- 
 eign to our daily habit. There is a wonderful 
 power in us of imparting ourselves to our surround- 
 ings ; the fountain of vitality constantly overflows 
 and fertilizes everything we touch. We give our- 
 selves to the rooms in which we live and the tools 
 with which we work. It is not only the pen with 
 which the great man wrote and the toy with which 
 the little child played that gain a kind of sacred- 
 ness in our eyes; it is almost every object that has 
 had human use. The infinite pains which Balzac 
 put into the description of the belongings of his 
 chief characters give evidence of that virile genius 
 which caught not only the direct ray of character 
 but gathered up also its myriad reflections in the 
 things it used. Life is always the most precious of 
 our possessions, and it is because inanimate things 
 often hold so much of it that they come to have a 
 kind of sanctity for us. 
 
 If the deeper history of our race were written, 
 would not one half of it record the attachments 
 which men have formed for visible and invisible 
 things — for homes and churches and countries, for 
 institutions and beliefs and ideals — and the other 
 
A NEW HEARTH. 1 85 
 
 half record the struggles and the agony with which 
 men have detached themselves from the things they 
 have loved? To humanize by use and by love, and 
 then to forsake as the trees drop their leaves in au- 
 tumn — is not this the human story and the human 
 destiny? There is a noble side to it, and a very 
 painful side. I can readily understand the half- 
 pathetic note of those who recall the past with a 
 poignant sense of loss; to whom the great inspira- 
 tions have remained in the beliefs and the ideals 
 of youth, and whose later journey has been one 
 ever-widening separation from the dear familiar 
 things of long ago. The men in the early part of 
 the century, who had read Addison and Dryden and 
 Pope in childhood, could not be expected to discern 
 at once the genius of Wordsworth, or to hear at first 
 the ethereal strain of Shelley ; as to-day many who 
 were nourished on Wordsworth and Byron and 
 Keats are unresponsive to Browning or Rossetti; 
 and now that the massive harmonies of the German 
 composers are filling the opera-houses, there are 
 many who openly or in secret are longing for those 
 brilliant Italian melodies which once captivated the 
 world. The past must be dear to us, since it was 
 once part of us, and when we recall its story we 
 turn the pages of our own biography. The old 
 hearthstone can never be other than sacred, since 
 the light of it was on faces that we loved, and the 
 song of it was often our own thought set to the 
 
1 86 MY STUDY FIRE. 
 
 cheerful music which the logs sing when the living 
 woods are silent. 
 
 But shall there be no new hearth because the old 
 hearth has so often warmed and comforted us ; no 
 new song because the old songs set our youth to 
 their thrilling music ? The charm of the past always 
 remains ; we do not surrender it when we accept 
 the new truth and listen to the new melody; we are 
 not disloyal to it when we live deeply and resolutely 
 in the age which gives us birth. For myself, a radi- 
 cal of radicals in the faith that the better things are 
 always in the future, that truth has always fresh 
 voices to speak for it, and art new inspirations to 
 lend it new beauty, I believe that the only way to 
 understand the past is to accept and live in the pres- 
 ent. The true Wordsworthian is he who discrmi- 
 nates the great and genuine work of the poet from 
 that which bears his name but not his genius — not 
 he who insists that all the lines have equal inspira- 
 tion. The true lover of Browning is not he who 
 affirms the infallibility of the poet, but he who takes 
 account of the ebb and flow of the poet's inspira- 
 tion. The true lover of the things that have been 
 done and the men who did them is not he who lives 
 in the past and lacks, therefore, a just perspective; 
 but he who lives in his own time, loyal to its duties 
 and open to its visions, and who sees the past as 
 one looks upon a landscape from an elevation which 
 brings all its landmarks and boundaries into clear 
 view. Let the fire blaze on the new hearth and 
 
A NEW HEARTH. 187 
 
 sing lustily in the throat of the new chimney ; its 
 light still falls on the old books and gilds the familiar 
 titles! We cannot reject the past if we would; it 
 is part of us, and it travels with us wherever we go. 
 Not by reproducing its forms, but by discerning its 
 spirit, do we really honor it. It is an illusion that 
 the past was fixed and permanent, and that we are 
 in the seething flood. The past was never less 
 mobile than the present; it was always changing, 
 and that which seems fixed and stable to us is the 
 form — the only part that is dead. Read deeply any 
 of the old books, and you will hear the roar of the 
 rushing river in them as distinctly as you hear it in 
 Hugo or Ibsen or Tennyson. Beneath the great 
 tragedies to which the Greeks listened what a vast 
 movement of the deeps of human thought and feel- 
 ing! Beneath the "Divine Comedy" what a whirl 
 of rushing tides! Beneath Marlowe and Shakes- 
 peare what tumult of the great seas ! Genius means 
 always and everywhere change and movement; never 
 yet has it lacked the vision which made the future 
 dear to it. When that vision ceases to inspire the 
 artist's thought and hand, genius will take its flight. 
 For the deepest and most inspiring truth in which 
 we live is the truth that life is change and growth, 
 not fixity of form and finality of development. 
 Things move, not because they are unstable, but 
 because a divine impulse impels them forward ; the 
 stars travel, not because they are wanderers in the 
 skies, but because they are the servants of a sub- 
 
loo MY STUDY FIRE. 
 
 lime order. There are no fixed and permanent 
 social conditions, because society is slowly moving 
 toward a nobler ordering of its duties and its rights ; 
 there are no final books, because the human spirit, 
 of which the greatest books are but imperfect ex- 
 pressions, is always passing through manifold experi- 
 ences into larger knowledge of itself and of the 
 world about it ; there are no final forms of art be- 
 cause truth has always new beauty to reveal and 
 beauty new truth to illustrate. Let the fire on the 
 new hearth sing its lusty song of the summers that 
 are past; its music has no note of forgetfulness ; 
 memory and prophecy are the burden of its song. 
 
CHAPTER XXXI. 
 
 AN IDYL OF WANDERING. 
 
 In these spring days all manner of alluring invi- 
 tations find their way into my study and by the sug- 
 gestions which they bring with them make its walls 
 narrow and dingy in spite of the glow which pleasant 
 associations have cast upon them. When I sit at 
 my writing table in the morning and carefully ar- 
 range the unwritten sheets which are to receive the 
 work of the day, a playful breeze comes in at the 
 window and willfully scatters the spotless pages 
 about the room as if to protest against work and 
 seclusion in these radiant days when the heavens 
 rain sweet influences and the earth gives back its 
 bloom and fragrance. I think then of all manner 
 of places where the earliest and tenderest beauty of 
 summer abides ; the imagination revolts against 
 work and, like a child let loose from city squares, 
 runs through meadows white with daisies and into 
 bosky hollows where the ferns breathe out a deli- 
 cious coolness. I cannot resist the impulse which 
 nature yearly renews in this golden hour of her 
 beauty, and so I sally forth to such refreshment 
 and adventure as one may look for in the hey-day 
 of spring time. 
 
 189 
 
19° MY STUDY FIRE. 
 
 Yesterday I waved my handkerchief with the 
 throng who crowded the pier and sent their huzzas 
 after the great steamer swinging slowly into the 
 stream, bound for that old world of history and 
 imagination which has such hold upon the most 
 American of us all. I followed the little group 
 whom my affection separated from the throng on 
 the deck until I could distinguish their faces no 
 more ; and then, when sight failed, thought traveled 
 fast upon their foaming wake and travels with them 
 still. I know what days of calm and nights of 
 splendor, when the stars hang luminous over the silent 
 world of waters, will be theirs ; I know with what 
 eager gaze they will scan the low horizon line when 
 the first indistinct outlines of another continent 
 break its perfect symmetry; I hear with them the 
 first confused murmur of that rich old-world life; I 
 follow them through historic street to historic church 
 and palace ; I see the blossoming hedges and mark 
 the low ripple of quiet rivers flowing seaward, the 
 murmur of whose movement lends its music to so 
 much English poetry ; I catch a sudden glimpse of 
 cloud-like peaks breaking the inaccessible solitude 
 of the sky, and in a moment the whole landscape of 
 that rich world sweeps into sight and invites me to 
 join them in their wanderings. 
 
 This season stirs one knows not what ancient in- 
 stinct still in the very blood of our race, answering 
 the first voices of the birds returning from their 
 long journey, and the first outburst of life flowing 
 
AN IDYL OF WANDERING. 191 
 
 back in the flood tide of advancing summer. The 
 history of civilization is an Odyssey of wandering. 
 From the hour when Abraham gathered his flocks 
 and crossed the Euphrates, and those first Aryan 
 ancestors of ours set out on their sublime emigra- 
 tion westward, to this day, when the ax of the pio- 
 neer rings through the California pine forests, and 
 the camp-fire of the explorer rises beside the Congo, 
 men have never ceased to travel hither and thither 
 driven by a divine impulse to redeem and replenish 
 the earth. In the long course of centuries the tent 
 of the Arab is as permanent as the rock-built temple, 
 and looking over history all races become nomadic. 
 No race accepts its environment as permanent and 
 final ; there is always somewhere beyond the hori- 
 zon of its present condition ; an undiscovered Atlan- 
 tis, an untrodden Isle of the Blessed, where life will 
 beat with stronger pulse, and smite into the obsta- 
 cles that surround it the impress of a higher destiny. 
 As the thought of a great, new world sent Colum- 
 bus wandering from court to court, so the intuition 
 of some larger and grander life impels men continu- 
 ally from continent to continent; not restlessness, 
 but aspiration, fills the sails and turns the prow sea- 
 ward forever and forever. The impulse which 
 would not suffer Ulysses, old and travel-worn, to 
 sit at ease stirs in the blood of the most modern of 
 us all; our hearts beat to the music of his last ap- 
 peal, spoken through one of the greatest of our 
 modern poets: 
 
I9 2 MY STUDY FIRE. 
 
 " "Tis not too late to seek a newer world. 
 Push off, and, sitting well in order, smite 
 The sounding furrows ; for my purpose holds 
 To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths 
 Of all the western stars, until I die." 
 
 Those to whom the impulse to wander comes in 
 vain are not without their consolations; the most 
 adventurous explorers have dared and won for 
 them, the most accomplished and keen-eyed travel- 
 ers have not forgotten them. When these fancies 
 invade my study and invite to journeys I cannot 
 take, I turn to the well-filled shelves where my 
 books of travel stand shoulder to shoulder and hold 
 out a world which I need only cross the room to 
 possess. Sometimes a rose penetrates my seclusion, 
 and brings me visions of that far East from which 
 it drew the first breath of its fragrant life. Then I 
 find myself unconsciously putting out a hand for 
 the well-worn books between whose covers Oriental 
 color and romance are hidden. I have long left 
 behind the mood in which I read Lamartine with 
 eager zest, but there are days when I still find the 
 old glamour resting on the pages of the "Souvenirs 
 d' Orient," and my imagination kindles again under 
 the spell of that fervid style. The East stands in 
 our thought of to-day for the old age of the race ; 
 but it was in the East that life began; and that 
 buried childhood comes back to us with all the 
 splendor of the earlier imagination. I hear once 
 more the "sighing sakia" in Curtis's "Nile Notes," 
 
AN IDYL OF WANDERING. 193 
 
 or draw rein on the great field of Esdraelon, flash- 
 ing with the white blossoms of the Syrian spring- 
 time; I cross the desert with "Eothen," and meet 
 the dreaded plague at the gates of Cairo. 
 
 But the prince of travelers is the superb Gautier, 
 whose rich physical temperament stood related to 
 the Eastern civilization so vitally that it almost 
 made him, what he sometimes claimed to be, a veri- 
 table Oriental. The color and glow of Eastern life 
 were in his mind before he sought them in Algiers 
 and at Constantinople; sensuous, full of delicate 
 physical perceptions of the rich and varied forms of 
 Oriental living, Gautier used all the resources of his 
 marvelous style to reproduce the fading splendor 
 which still remains among the older races. But 
 Gautier, with his leonine face and Eastern tempera- 
 ment, had the sensitive imagination of a true traveler: 
 he reflected his environment with a fidelity which 
 brought out not only its reality but its ideal also. In 
 the "Voyage en Russie" and the "Voyage en Es- 
 pagne," no less than in his pictures of Algerian and 
 Turkish life, we breathe the very atmosphere which 
 surrounds him, and are conscious of a thousand deli- 
 cate gradations of color and manner which would 
 have escaped an eye less keen, an imagination less 
 plastic. 
 
 D'Amicis is less brilliant, less fertile, less subtly 
 and marvelously endowed with mastery of the re- 
 sources of speech; but he has sharp insight, 
 broad sympathies, a fine faculty of reproducing 
 13 
 
194 MY STUDY FIRE. 
 
 local coloring. His "Holland" is a classic of 
 travel. 
 
 From those marvelous "Voyages" of Richard 
 Hakluyt to the charming books into which Charles 
 Dudley Warner has put his impressions of foreign 
 lands and peoples, the literature of travel has been 
 one of increasing richness and fascination ; but as I 
 look over these goodly volumes, I recognize their 
 kinship with the graver works of history that stand 
 in solemn rows not far distant. The lighter volumes 
 are records of personal wanderings; the graver 
 ones are records of those mysterious wanderings of 
 races in which history began, and which it will 
 always continue to report. In this latest century 
 we have seen a transference of races far more roman- 
 tic and impressive than that wonderful "Flight of 
 a Tartar Tribe," whose story De Quincey tells with 
 such dramatic skill. The ancient instincts still sur- 
 vive beneath the culture of civilization, and ever and 
 anon we are moved into strange, vagrant moods by 
 their reappearance in consciousness. It is the shal- 
 lower part of life, after all, that finds expression. 
 Arts, literatures, civilization, are the few drops 
 flung into the air from the running stream, and 
 made iridescent by the passing flash of the sunlight; 
 the vast current of thought, emotion, experience, 
 flows on in darkness and silence. Like the tropical 
 tree, civilization must support each expansion by 
 sending down a new trunk to that ancient earth which 
 cradled our infancy and from whom we can never 
 
AN IDYL OF WANDERING. 195 
 
 be long separated. In the midst of our highest 
 refinements, and under the influence of our ripest 
 culture, there comes to each of us that mood which 
 Mr. Lang has so admirably expressed in his noble 
 sonnet on "The Odyssey ": 
 
 " As one that for a weary space has lain 
 
 Lulled by the song of Circe and her wine 
 In gardens near the pale of Proserpine, 
 
 Where that ^Esean isle forgets the main, 
 
 And only the low lutes of love complain, 
 And only shadows of wan lovers pine, 
 As such an one were glad to know the brine 
 
 Salt on his lips, and the large air again — 
 
 So gladly, from the songs of modern speech 
 Men turn, and see the stars, and feel the free 
 Shrill wind beyond the close of heavy flowers, 
 And through the music of the languid hours 
 
 They hear like ocean on a western beach 
 The surge and thunder of the Odyssey." 
 
CHAPTER XXXII. 
 
 THE OPEN "WINDOW. 
 
 I have noticed that at the close of a long winter 
 the opening of the windows makes 7 my books look 
 faded and dusty. Yesterday, with the bright fire- 
 light playing upon them, they were fresh and even 
 brilliant; to-day, with the soft blue sky shining 
 through the window, they are old and shabby. This 
 singular transformation has taken place more than 
 once in my experience, and as in each instance the 
 spell has been wrought on the same books, I am 
 forced to believe that the change is in me and not 
 in my familiar volumes. In winter I find them 
 opulent in life and warmth ; I feel in them the 
 throb of the world's heart-beat; but when spring 
 comes and the warm airs are full of invitation to 
 the senses and the imagination, they become sud- 
 denly meager, artificial, and commonplace. They 
 shrink from the strong sunlight, and in the affluent 
 splendor of the summer they are the pale ghosts of 
 their former selves. 
 
 The world of books is at best a world of shadows ; 
 
 one turns from it at times to drink anew and with 
 
 unspeakable delight at the inexhaustible fountains 
 
 of life. Commentaries are admirable in their place, 
 
 196 
 
THE OPEN WINDOW. 197 
 
 but no true scholar ever permits them to stand long 
 between his thought and the text; they help him in 
 obscure passages, they light up dark and difficult 
 sentences, but they are only aids ; the text itself is 
 always his supreme and final object. The man who 
 goes to books instead of life, who gets his knowl- 
 edge of humanity out of Shakespeare and of nature 
 out of Wordsworth, will never know either pro- 
 foundly. The Alps are more majestic than the 
 noblest picture of them which artist ever put upon 
 canvas, and men and women in the multiform rela- 
 tions of life more wonderful than any portraiture by 
 the greatest dramatist. It is this mistake of taking 
 the commentary for the text which makes most liter- 
 ary men the slaves of art instead of the masters of 
 life and its lessons; which fills their work with 
 musical echoes and robs it of that mighty and com- 
 manding utterance which truth learned at first hand 
 always finds for itself. 
 
 The library is at once a storehouse of treasures 
 and a prison ; its value depends entirely upon its use. 
 If one's thought is hourly and patiently travers- 
 ing the highways of human life, if one's heart pene- 
 trates with deep and abiding sympathy the small 
 and the great experiences of men and women, one 
 may use books and find nothing but light and power 
 in them ; they will discover relations which have 
 escaped observation; they will bring within the 
 horizon of thought vast and fertile tracts through 
 which one has never been able to journey; they will 
 
l 9 3 MY STUDY FIRE. 
 
 suggest answers and solutions which will aid immeas- 
 urably in the comprehension of the great mysteri- 
 ous fact of life. But if one goes to books for funda- 
 mental conceptions, for that experience which one 
 never really gets unless he acquires it at first hand, 
 for those large, controlling views of things which 
 ought to be the creation of one's individual struggle 
 with problems and difficulties and mysteries, they 
 will prove inadequate and misleading teachers. No 
 art can conceal or preserve that which has been bor- 
 rowed from another; such second-hand creation 
 often charms by its skill for a time, but its lack of 
 vitality sooner or later makes it appear the barren, 
 useless thing it is. No skill will save the picture 
 which lacks the touch of nature, no art will give 
 immortality to the book in which the pulse of life 
 has never throbbed. 
 
 To-day the generous warmth of the sun has 
 tempted me out of my study and beguiled me into 
 hours of aimless wandering. I have seen the great 
 expanse of water between the arching elms, and 
 have noted, with a kind of exultation, that the trees 
 are no longer leafless ; the exquisite tracery of bare 
 twig and branch is not so sharp of outline as when 
 I saw it a week ago ; a delicate color suffuses itself 
 over all, and blurs the edges that were sharp against 
 the sky. A robin flashes across the stone wall, and 
 yonder a medley of notes, dissonant with anger, 
 betrays the recurrence of those annual quarrels which 
 settle the question of possession in more than one 
 
THE OPEN WINDOW. 199 
 
 tree-top. A soft mist has touched the woods at the 
 water's edge, and woven a prophetic charm over 
 them ; I find myself already weeks in advance of 
 the season, for I seem to see even now the banners 
 of summer afloat there, and to hear the inarticulate 
 murmur of the forest weighty with the secrets of for- 
 gotten centuries. It is a new heaven which bends 
 so benignantly over me, and a new earth which stirs 
 with unconscious life about me. A tide of creative 
 energy surges through all things, and reinspires my 
 faith in the coming of a clearer and yet clearer 
 revelation of the divine mystery. In each recurring 
 spring some sensitive soul has stood where I stand, 
 and felt this subtle harmony with the new world 
 bursting into leaf and flower about him, and, nearer 
 akin to nature than I, has overheard some whisper 
 of tree to tree, or bird to bird, or star to star. 
 Straightway a new line has found its way into the 
 world's anthology, a new song has found words for 
 itself in the vocabulary of human speech, and finally, 
 a new book gets into my study. But, at the best, it 
 is only a faded reflection of that luminous sky which 
 glows from this latest page, only a faint and confused 
 murmur of that forest which I hear under the spell 
 of this latest interpreter. The miracle remains 
 incommunicable; no book will ever explain it to 
 me; it must be wrought in and upon me. 
 
 THE END.