not worried by the sciences, puts a dryad in the tree, a nymph in the stream, a god in the cloud, voices in the leaves, and spirits in the winds, and perchance in a verdant field, where the sage botanist will chiefly find ten or more species of graminae, the poet sings (and in this case it is Robert Herrick)

Here in green meadows sits eternal May,
Purpling the margents, while perpetual day
So doubly gilds the air, as that no night
Can ever rust the enamel of the light.
Here naked younglings, handsome striplings, run
Their goals for maidens' kisses, which when done
Then unto dancing forth the learned round
Commixt they meet, with endless roses crowned;
And here we'll sit on primrose banks, and see
Love's chorus led by Cupid.

Certainly the poets who have been singing these last three hundred years are not victims of hallucinations, they are not averse to occasionally taking the world as the rest of us do, and they suffer from no invincible prejudice against chemistry or physics. But their imagination, which is the gift which makes them literary, is their charter of liberty from the restrictions of formal knowledge, giving them free play in the azure and purple fields of dreams. They assume an ignorance, and they can assume it, because we, as

humans, possess no indisputable sense of certainty, and here our claim remains fortified and unassailable. Those of us who are certain, will never make poets, and never add poetry to the sum of literary effects. Poetry is a surrender to caprice, but a caprice which ministers to emotion, and always is beautiful.

If we may say so with entire reverence, God can use neither imagination or poetry; for His absolute knowledge forbids both. The intense basic and interfused oneness of His existence with creation, allows no subterfuges of fancy, no indulgence of aesthetic invention, no room for alternatives, no place for tasteful suggestions or melodic impersonations, nor is there any desire or need of them. Absolute identification with reality kills the main springs of invention as a literary agent. Immobility of mind is the penalty of perfect knowledge, and "to know as we are known" means the death note of creative enterprise. As we have noted, in Heaven, or in any state where Sin and Misery are quite absent, and forgotten, much of the literature of the earth as we know it must cease, so also in such beatific conditions where ignorance is absolutely banished; that mortal state of irreparable doubt, in which we now live, quite gone, poetry will become a memory, the impulse, the energumen, that makes it, dead.

Today, so full and dauntless is the light of science, so enthralling the hunt for facts, so sanitary and clean the asylums of religion, that poetry feels the negation of its province, and turns its fancies to the far past, of which it may say what it best pleases.

If it stands in the light of the forum and feels its mythologies all banished, it still turns to the ends and purposes of life, it becomes introspective and mingles its lament or raises its paean with those who despair, or those who challenge and

go

forward.

CHAPTER VIII.

THE CONCLUSION

If books were quite absent from the world and the pleasure of reading banished the ennui of life to some might seem quite insurmountable. The daily papers which are now involved in our lives to such a degree as to seem almost a necessary part of its tissue, and which carry on their pages the chronology of each day as it were, lifting their Argus-eyed inspection upon the business, the political, the domestic, or social aspects of the earth, these as indispensable adjuncts to the mechanics of life might be less easily spared. Books seem to us invaluable, but it is apparent that great numbers of people go through the motions of life successfully, and even enjoy its various stock of sensations without recourse to the pages of authors. And it can be at once remembered that the ancients accomplished life without them, in our sense, while almost whole nations of men endure the privation today of never seeing a book from their cradle to their grave.

All of which goes to prove that they are not essential to the routine of life, to which the cynic might eagerly add that they are not only not necessary, but

that the real pleasures of life would gain a desirable prominence if they were out of the way, and that the conceit and stupidity of authors only aggravated or increased the miseries of existence. He might point with ill-natured admiration to the unmolested physical happiness of animals whose brains are not invaded by the eccentricities of philosophers, or their digestion disturbed by the accumulation of ephemeral information. Of course this is perversion, and the burden of life has derived a sensible easement by reason of the pleasures brought to the mind through books.

But all books are not literature. A great number serve us all sorts of facts, and the enormous mass of purely educational works, though well written, and the clusters of reportorial books on travels, lives, and events, are hardly to be considered as literary. They may become so, as scientific books often do, if so written in style and treatment as to edify or recreate our minds with that peculiar pleasure which we realize in choice and expressive phraseology, adroitness of illustration, and illuminating thought.

But Literature per se addresses the sentiments, and we have endeavored to show that as an accident of human nature, or let us say more convincingly, as a part of it, Literature best develops in an environ