THE LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LOS ANGELES MY STUDY FIRE. MY STUDY FIRE UNDER THE TREES AND ELSEWHERE SHORT STUDIES IN LITERATURE ESSAYS IN LITERARY INTERPRETATION My STUDY FIRE, SECOND SERIES ESSAYS ON NATURE AND CULTURE ESSAYS ON BOOKS AND CULTURE ESSAYS ON WORK AND CULTURE THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT NORSE STORIES WORKS AND DAYS THE GREAT WORD IN THE FOREST OF ARDEN. Illustrated MY STUDY FIRE. Illustrated UNDER THE TREES. Illustrated A CHILD OF NATURE. Illustrated NORSE STORIES. Illustrated IN ARCADY. Illustrated NATURE AND CULTURE. Illustrated MY STUDY FIRE ** BY HAMILTON WRIGHT MABIE NEW YORK : PUBLISHED BY DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY MDCCCGXIIJ Copyright, 1890 and 189S, BY DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY. All rights reserved. JOHN WILSON AND SON, CAMBRIDGE, U.S.A. PS 3353 TO J. T. M. 48G Contents CHAPTER PAGE I. THE FIRE LIGHTED i II. NATURE AND CHILDHOOD ... I z III. THE ANSWER OF LIFE .... 23 IV. A POET'S CROWN OF SORROW . . 31 V. THE FAILINGS OF GENIUS ... 42 VI. CHRISTMAS EVE 51 VII. NEW YEAR'S EVE 62 VIII. A SCHOLAR'S DREAM 70 IX. A FLAME OF DRIFTWOOD ... 90 X. DREAM WORLDS 96 XI. A TEXT FROM SIDNEY .... 106 XII. THE ARTIST TALKS 117 XIII. ESCAPING FROM BONDAGE . . . 125 XIV. SOME OLD SCHOLARS 132 XV. DULL DAYS 142 XVI. THE UNIVERSAL BIOGRAPHY. . . 149 XVII. A SECRET OF GENIUS . . . . 157 XVIII. BOOKS AND THINGS 163 vii Contents CHAPTER PAGE XIX. A RARE NATURE 171 XX. THE CUCKOO STRIKES' TWELVE . 177 XXI. A GLIMPSE OF SPRING .... 187 XXII. A PRIMEVAL MOOD 197 XXIII. THE METHOD OF GENIUS . . . 205 XXIV. A HINT FROM THE SEASON . . 215 XXV. A BED OF EMBERS 224 XXVI. A DAY OUT OF DOORS . . . 235 XXVII. BESIDE THE Isis 246 XXVIII. A WORD FOR IDLENESS . . . 256 XXIX. "THE BLISS OF SOLITUDE" , . 263 XXX. THE MYSTERY OF ATMOSPHERE . 270 XXXI. A NEW HEARTH 278 XXXII. AN IDY-L OF WANDERING . . . 287 XXXIII. THE OPEN WINDOW .... 297 My Study Fire FIRST SERIES 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 writ ing-table on sharp autumnal mornings 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 My Study Fire season which has befriended us as none of its predecessors has 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 unmistak able aspect of winter in the sky and upon the fields ; the little land-locked harbour 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 barren day ; thought and feeling were both congealed, and refused to flow, and even the faithful pen, that has pa tiently traversed so many sheets of blank paper, stumbled and halted. After a fruitless 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 The Fire Lighted been heaped with wood in my absence, and all things made ready for lighting the fire. We lingered long at the dinner-table that evening, 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, mys terious 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 curiously mixed regret and anticipation. I take out my watch in unconscious recognition of the impor tance of an event which marks the autum nal 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 3 My Study Fire fixed on the fireplace, and every swift advance of flame, creeping silently from stick to stick until the whole mass is 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 transfiguration of life ; it discloses to me anew the very soul of nature, it reveals the thought 4 The Fire Lighted that runs through literature, it discovers the heart of my hope and aspiration. I catch in this transient splendour 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 windows, 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. 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, 5 My Study Fire 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 deeper 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 is perhaps 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 un profitable to those whose waking hours are given to honest work; dreams are The Fire Lighted not without meaning, for they are com bined 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 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 unconsciously 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 revelations of him self 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, 7 My Study Fire 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 re treating splendour of autumn ; I hear at intervals 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 fra grance which escaped when spring broke the alabaster box and poured out the treasures of the year. Each season has lavished its wealth on me, and each has awakened its kindred moods and stirred its kindred thoughts within me. I am conscious, as I look into the bed of glow ing coals to which the fire has sunk, that The Fire Lighted I am even now undergoing the subtle process of change from season to season. The habits, the moods, the impressions, which summer created in me have gone, and new aptitudes, thoughts, and emo tions 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 dif ferent world has risen into view. Pan pipes no more, while Orion blazes over head and leads the glittering constella tions. Thought, that has played truant through the long days, forgetting books and men in its chase after beauty and its stealthy ambuscade 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 refresh ment of the race. The glow of the dying fire no longer 9 My Study Fire 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 com panions of the short wintry days and the long wintry nights. To find the life that is in them, to read with clear eyes what ever 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 10 The Fire Lighted 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. ii Chapter II Nature and Childhood IS it not due to November that some discreet person 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 rustling foliage, to complete her charm. Even the splendid tradition of October has not overawed its maligned successor, and of the oft-repeated slan- 12 Nature and Childhood ders of the poets no notice has been taken save perhaps to cast a more bril liant light upon their graves. It is cer tainly high time that the traditional November 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 borderland between winter and summer is certainly the most beautiful and allur ing part of the year. The late spring and the late autumn months hold in equipoise the charms of both seasons. Their characteristics 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 au tumnal 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 13 My Study Fire 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, foli age, birds, clouds, snows, and storms how marvellous 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 intelligible to childhood than most people think. Children of sensitive and imaginative temper have marvellous capacity for re ceiving impressions : they absorb as un consciously to themselves as to others. 14 Nature and Childhood When they seem most indifferent or pre occupied they are often most impression able. Unperceived by those who are nearest them, unrecognised at the mo ment by themselves, there often press upon the mind of a child the deepest and most awful mysteries of life ; mys teries that lie far below the plummet of thought. It is only as one thinks back and recalls out of memory those marvellous moments when every visible thing seemed suddenly smitten with un reality in the presence of some great spiritual truth, felt but uncompre- hended, that one realises 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 My Study Fire serene and noble forehead that might be the same ; but the frozen eyelids, the darkness that seemed to steal from be neath them, the marble lips, the stif fening hands, laid palm to palm, as if repeating the supplications 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 mo ment ; awe, not fear, fell upon me ; and whilst I stood, a solemn wind began to blow the saddest that ear ever heard. It was a wind that might have swept the fields of mortality for a thousand cen turies. Many times since, upon summer days, when the sun is about the hottest, I have remarked 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 eternity." That wind, more real than any that ever blew over earthly fields, was heard by no one but the imaginative 16 Nature and Childhood 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 German boy of six years thought of the terrible earthquake at Lisbon in 1755, when she happened upon another very interesting and sig nificant passage in child life. The boy Goethe had heard much of the discus sion about religious matters which was warm in those days, and invaded even the quiet and somewhat 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 2 I7 My Study Fire stars, the days and seasons, the animals and plants. The boy could ascribe no form to this Being ; he therefore sought him in his works, and would, in the good Old Testament fashion, build him an altar." To accomplish this deep and secret purpose he took a lacquered music-stand and ornamented it accord ing 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 burn ing-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 sin gularly noble boy ; graceful in fig ure, charming in manner, expressive in countenance, sensitive, responsive, and 18 Nature and Childhood imaginative. One night after he had fallen asleep he was suddenly awakened by a noise, and, looking out of the win dow, 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 pene trate to my inmost being. My little heart beat fast and faster, till I could bear the intolerable blaze no more. And, hearing the steps of some ser vant in the passage, 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. . . . 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 bril liant circle stepped forth my mother, and, folding me in her bosom, said, soothingly, c What troubles my boy?' 19 My Study Fire 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 experience 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 Emerson read, and the strange, penetrating sweetness of that voice, so spiritual in its tone, so full of interpre tation 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 20 Nature and Childhood Across the watery vale, and shout again, Responsive to his call, with quivering peals, And long halloos, and screams, and echoes loud, 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 sim plicity of nature itself, marks an epoch in a child's life ; it is as if a door were suddenly left ajar into some world un seen before. " 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 stand ing, a very young child, in the outer 21 My Study Fire door, and looking leftward at the stack of the fuel-wood, when all at once the internal vision, f I am a me ' (Ich bin em Ich} y came like a flash from heaven before me, and in gleaming light ever afterward continued." The incommuni cable 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 ap pealed to us with a strange familiarity ! To imaginative childhood, is 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 parsonage " ? 22 Chapter III The Answer of Life THE short December afternoon was already fading 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 retreating 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 vigour and vitality, 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 splendour. Then she drew up a low ottoman, and sat down to enjoy the cheer and warmth which she 23 My Study Fire had evoked. It was not the first time that something which had smouldered in my hands had caught life and beauty in hers. I was in a sombre mood. I had spent the morning, and, for that matter, a good many mornings, re-read ing the Greek plays, and striving by a patient and persistent use of the imagi nation to possess myself of the secret of those masterly and immortal crea tions. To me they had long ceased to be dead, and to-day 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 ^Eschylus unfolds the doom of the house of Atreus. I had seen the flashing fires which lighted Agamemnon home to his death ; I had heard Cassan dra'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 24 The Answer of Life the hands of Orestes ; and I had followed the Fury-haunted steps of the unwilling executioner of the eternal law from the temple at Delphi to the judg ment seat at Athens. All these things were still in my memory, and the room had caught a solemn and awful quietude in the overshadowing presence of these vast and terrible representations of an tique 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. 25 My Study Fire " You are thinkng," 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 thinking 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 prob- lems 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 labour has re gained the harmony which he lost, I no longer sorrow that .ZEschylus's f Prome theus Bound ' is a fragment. I see before me in actual realisation 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 con- 26 The Answer of Life fused 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 in terrupted, " 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 face to shield it from the glow of the ambitious fire ; " yes, more dra matically stated, because all the irrelevant details are omitted. There is the mate rial for a drama in the career of almost every person whom we know, but the movement is overlaid and concealed by all kinds of trivial matter. A dramatist 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 27 My Study Fire life runs to a casual observer. The prob lems 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 28 The Answer of Life those old Oriental religions which deified the processes of nature the births and deaths and growth of things. The festi vals which greeted the return of spring, with overflowing life in its train, and the sad processionals 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 deepen ing shadows in the room " I do not believe that the deeper problems of liv ing 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 solutions 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 29 My Study Fire instance, an observer will often catch, as in a flash of revelation, some fruitful sug gestion of his own relation to the uni verse, some far-reaching analogy of the processes of his own growth. This wis dom of experience, which often ripens even in untrained minds into a kind of clairvoyant vision, is the deepest wisdom after all, and books are only valuable and enduring as they include and express it." I was just about to illustrate by say ing 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 burning cheer ily on the hearth, Rosalind meditatively plying her needle, and wind and rain without increasing by contrast the inner warmth and brightness, it is not easy to realise 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 sorrow are for the most part locked up in ourselves, but there are always those against whom, by some mysterious conjunction of the stars, calamity and disaster 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 31 My Study Fire gifts ; but this suffering has often no thorn of outward loss thrust into its sen sitive 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 consolation and strength. The anguish of the cross has always been the prelude to the psalms of deliverance, and the world has made no new conquest of truth and life except through those who have trodden 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 32 A Poet's Crown of Sorrow 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 misfor tunes or his heart history, began the evening by reading aloud Mr. Gosse's picturesque " Firdousi in Exile," a poem of pleasant descriptive quality, but lack ing that undertone of pathos which the story ought to have carried with it. Such a story puts one in a silent mood, and in the lull of conversation I have read to myself Mr. Arnold's fine render ing of the famous episode of " Sohrab and Rustem " from the " Epic of 3 33 My Study Fire Kings ; " a noble piece of English blank verse, from which I cannot forbear quot ing 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 34 A Poet's Crown of Sorrow 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 tribu tary. The pathos of such life lies not so much in individual suffering as in the contrast between the service rendered and the recognition accorded to it. The poet had immortalised his country and his master, 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 know. 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 centuries, Firdousi was condemned to learn the bitterness of wide and restless wander- 35 My Study Fire ings. Many a Tartar 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 jour neying. 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 stations in Firdousi's exile. It is one of the unconscious 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 richest 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 36 A Poet's Crown of Sorrow of exile. The Persian poet had written the " Epic of Kings " in a palace, and with the resources of a king at com mand, but Dante was a homeless wan derer in the years which saw the birth of the Divine Comedy. To that great song in which the heart of Mediae valism was to live forever, Florence contrib uted 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 pro phetic sight of genius, cut off from all natural channels of growth, activity, and ambition, condemned to .... prove how salt a savour 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 sensitive ness to injustice, to imagine in some 37 My Study Fire degree what fathomless depths of suffer ing 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 blacksmith comes to mind as indicating how his proud spirit resented the slight est injustice. One morning, 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 over come 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." 38 A Poet's Crown of Sorrow "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, henceforth sang other songs. This simple incident discloses that sen sitiveness 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 in such crowns is the sense of ingratitude and injustice, the consciousness of the possession of great gifts rejected and cast aside. There is nothing more tragic in all the range 39 My Study Fire 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 agonising 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 implacable 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 travelled 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 connection 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 40 A Poet's Crown of Sorrow by it. If, in the doing of this, what men call happiness 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 mo ments of clear sight, of assurance of vic tory, of unspeakable fellowship with truth and life and God, which outweigh years of sorrow and bitterness. Firdousi knew that he had left Persia a priceless posses sion, and the Purgatorio of Dante was not too much to pay for the Paradiso," "And yet," said Rosalind slowly, looking into the fire, and thinking, per haps, 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 falls in with the thought and the talk that are inspired by it. Occasionally, however, 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 dis membered tree ruthlessly cut down in the morning of life, that energetically 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 humour it is quite likely to 42 The Failings of Genius take Rosalind and myself with it; on such occasions the quiet talk of 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 powdery around the expiring embers. Even then the pretty bellows which came several Christmases ago from one whose charm makes it im possible to use the word common even to describe her friendship for 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 idealisa tion of life that these discussions rise and flourish. This charming woman persists, for instance, in declining to take any ac count of traits and characteristics in emi nent 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 43 My Study Fire attracted than repelled by the fallings of great men ; in their human limitations, 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 emphasised, misrepresented, and exag gerated 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, Heine, Carlyle, may be wisely consigned to that insatiable spirit 44 The Failings of Genius of flame which devours falsehoods and crude, worthless stuff with the same ap petite 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 su perstition that every man of letters must be brought to the bar of the Thirty- nine Articles ; and criticism in this coun try is slow to learn from such spirits as Emerson the true standards and measures of greatness. For the most part, igno rance 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 Rosa lind, 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. 45 My Study Fire It is the constant tendency of life, like the earth's crust, to cool off and harden ; it is the common task of all men of origi- o nal power to reverse this course of things. A good many men perform this duty in a needlessly offensive 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 whole strength into a struggle on vital princi ples. And yet there is no reason why a great man should not indulge in his little idiosyncrasy if he chooses to ; surely in telligent 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 individualities who are not lost in the mob, who have their own 46 The Failings of Genius 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 under- stand him ; hence the cloud of miscon ception and misrepresentation in which he lives and dies. To a man of sensi tive temperament this process is often in tensely painful ; to a man of virile temper it is often full of humourous suggestion. Gifted men take a certain satirical satis faction 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 defence of him self 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 fur nishes a good illustration ; among all the mass of writing relating to this man of genius that has been poured upon a de fenceless world, it is safe to say that one can count on the fingers of one hand the 47 My Study Fire articles that have betrayed any real under standing of the man. One readily un derstands, in the light of this and similar past records, the fervour with which Sir Henry Taylor reports Tennyson as say ing that he thanked God with his whole heart and soul that he knew nothing, and 'that the world knew nothing, of Shakespeare 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 j But thou, go by. 48 The Failings of Genius 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 and honour him for it must always com mand an answering glow of gratitude. It is the vulgar love of novelty, publi city, 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 shal low current of popular applause there runs for every genuine man of letters a deep, quiet current of intelligent sym- 4 49 My Study Fire pathy and love which fertilises 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 illustration : " I met in the train yesterday a meagre, 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 appropriated 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 expectancy, and I enter easily into the universal dream which at this moment holds all the children of Christendom 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 marvellous doings once filled the minds of men, he alone survives. He has out lived all the great gods, and all the im pressive and poetic conceptions which once flitted between heaven and earth ; My Study Fire 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 some times, its sound heart of truth. He who does not see in the legend of Santa Claus a beautiful faith on one side, and the naive 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. Ortho- 52 Christmas Eve doxy generally consists in retaining and emphasising 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 pleasant 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 minis ters 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 morrow. There have been hurried and whispered confer ences 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 S3 My Study Fire been constantly under lock and key, visited only when certain sharp-sighted eyes were occupied in other directions. Through all this scene of mystery Rosa lind 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 con spiracy of love ! After dinner, eaten, let it be confessed, with more haste and less accompaniment of talk than usual, the parlour 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 bed- 54 Christmas Eve fellows 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 sombre rows of books a homelike and festive aspect. It pleases me to note the spray of holly that ob scures the title of Bacon's solemn and weighty " Essays," and I get half a page of suggestions for my notebook from the fact that a sprig of mistletoe has fallen on old Burton's " Anatomy of Melan choly." Rosalind has reason to be sat isfied, 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 think ing, as I watch her piling up the fire for a blaze of unusual splendour, that if 55 My Study Fire 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 sym pathy 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 be yond the outer court of criticism before we bestow upon them that phrase of supreme regard. There are other books of the heart around me, but on Christ mas Eve it is Alexander Smith's " Dream- thorp " which always seems to lie at my hand, and when I take it up the well- 56 Christmas Eve worn volume falls open at the essay or " Christmas." It is a good many years since Rosalind and I began to read to gether on Christmas Eve this beautiful meditation 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 recollections 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 landscape about Dreamthorp, with the low, dark hill in the background, and over it " the tender radiance that pre cedes the moon ; " the village windows are all lighted, and the "whole place shines like a congregation of glow worms." 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 Christ mas bells still hover ; the village folk 57 My Study Fire 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 applications for every thankful soul, and then the congregation 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 sor rowful memories of our common life, recalled at this hour that the light of the 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 Milton close at hand. We have had our commemoration service of 58 Christmas Eve 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 mould ; And hell itself will pass away, And leave her dolorous mansions to the peering day. 59 My Study Fire The oracles are dumb, No voice or hideous hum Runs through the arched roof in words deceiving ; 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 win dow. The heavens are ablaze with 60 Christmas Eve light, and somewhere amid those cir cling 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 expir ing flame, because I find its slow fading into darkness harmonious 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 breath less 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 62 New Year's Eve that come with the coming of darkness on other nights. The vast and shadowy stream of time sweeps on without break, but the traveller 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 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 expiring 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 63 My Study Fire 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, some thing 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, Shakespeare, 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 from the meshes of legal interpretation. Here 64 New Year's Eve 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 mediaeval Florence and the Italy just on the threshold 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 civilisation, one feels that here are the inheritors of immortal ity. 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 for gotten 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 immor tality of the elder kings when they stood in unbroken line with the gods. Every library which has its poets' corner and s 65 My Study Fire 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 rule a mightier host to-day than ever before, and the boundaries of their com mon realm are also the frontier lines of civilisation. In such company the pas sage of time is, after all, a thing of little account. It destroys only the imper fect, the partial, the limited, the transi tory ; here are the truths over which time has no power, because they are part of that eternity to which it is itself trib utary. And just here is the secret of the immortality which these kings have inherited ; they have passed through all the appearances of things, the passing symbols, and the imperfect embodiments of truth to truth itself, which is contem poraneous with every age and race. Time destroys only the symbols and the inadequate expression of truth, but it is powerless to touch truth. The writers who were once famous and now forgotten 66 New Year's Eve 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 contem porary 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, sum ming up the common experience of the . race and distilling it drop by drop into the perfect forms of art. The man who knows his Homer thoroughly knows 67 My Study Fire more about the Greeks than he who has familiarised himself with all the work of the archaeologist and philologist and his torians of the Homeric age-, the man who has mastered Dante has penetrated the secret of medievalism ; 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 writers, and waste our strength in a vain endeavour 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 ac quaintance, 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 68 New Year's Eve 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 mantel 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 splendour 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 un broken rows one read august and impe rial names in the kingdom of thought. An ample writing-table, piled high with pamphlets and books, stood in the centre A Scholar's Dream of the room, and the loose sheets of paper carelessly thrown together gave evidence of a work only recently interrupted. With out, 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 medi tation that was almost wholly pathetic. His seventy years passed in swift proces sion 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 mas tered all its wisdom ; his heart had felt its My Study Fire deep pulsations in the solitude of un broken and heroic studies; his genius had given its spirit a voice of matchless compass and eloquence. For half a cen tury the world had laid his words to heart, and built its faith upon his think ing. While the busy tides of activity ebbed and flowed through the great chan nels of civilisation, he had lived apart in a deep, earnest, and whole-hearted conse cration to truth. The clearly cut feat ures, the keen, benignant eyes, the noble poise of head, the wistful expression as of one striving to pierce the heart of some mystery, were signs of a personality that had left its impress on two genera tions, and now, in its grand maturity, was still waiting for some larger fulfil ment of the promise of life. Behind him, among the throng of books, indistin guishable in the dim light, were the works into which the life of his life had gone. They recorded explorations into many fields, they had torn down old faiths amid storms of discussion and condemnation, 72 A Scholar's Dream they had laid new foundations for belief in the silence of meditative and self- forgetful years. The strength and the weakness of the age had written them selves upon those pages, in the ebbing of inherited belief and the inflow of convic tions 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 numbering the brief mo ments 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 deli cate hands moved on without conscious ness of the mighty life whose limits they 73 My Study Fire 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 remote and unconscious; the old man was alone with the sinking fire and the passing century. The minute 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 little clock rang twelve. Norton shivered as if a sudden chill had struck him, and peal on peal through the mid night air the bells rang in a new century. The man who had worked as few men work, and yet had shown no sign 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 impalpable presence of the new century rose like a vast empty house through which no hu- 74 A Scholar's Dream man feet had walked, in which no human hearts had beat, over which no atmos phere 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 con ferred it; his friendships seemed dim and ghostly, like myths out of which the currents of life had ebbed. With a sink ing heart, groping like one suddenly be come blind for some familiar thing, he turned and looked at the row of books behind 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 record 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 recalled, as it fell upon volume after 75 My Study Fire volume, how 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 patience. Here were works of daring speculation that had traversed the whole realm of knowledge and struck luminous lines of order through many an outlying 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 fruit age 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- 76 A Scholar's Dream revealing splendour ; here were its affir mations and its negations ; here was, in a word, the sum and substance of that in dividual 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 book, and a deep, unutterable pathos filled them with unshed tears. There had been one year of his prosper ous life when the light of the sun was darkened 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, 77 My Study Fire 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 train ing of the schools, the long discipline 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 re ceded 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 sympathy, this little book had been born. It was a transcription of experience ; there were training, culture, deep thought on every page, but these were fused, vitalised, humanised by suffering, by struggle, by aspiration. It was a chapter out of living 78 A Scholar's Dream history ; the mind of the universe was there in hint and suggestion of bold thought, but the heart of the universe 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 unforgotten years sounded again in his soul, buried hopes rose from their sepulchres 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 returned with their precious minis tries. Norton opened page after page of the past as he turned page after page of the little book. 79 My Study Fire " The world cares little for this," he said to himself 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 rekindled 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 sending 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 project itself far on into the coming time. The past slowly drifted out of his thought, which moved forward as if to discover what lay be hind the veil of the future. The low, monotonous ticking of the little clock became, in his ears, the audible pulsa- 80 A Scholar's Dream 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 anxiously 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 solitary volume greeted him like a friend in a crowd of strange faces. He searched for books that had been his hourly com panions, and discovered only here and 6 81 My Study Fire there a single thin volume, the sole re siduum of a system of thought. With a pathetic interest he read the names that were meaningless to him, and tak ing down one of the strange volumes opened it at random. The first sen tence 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. " The writer from whom I have quoted," the author went on to say, " was a man whose in tegrity 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 evident teaching of fact." Norton closed the book with a sinking heart. The theory held up as a conspicuous 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 82 A Scholar's Dream opened it also at random. He read the first page carefully, and with a growing confusion of thought. There were sen tences which he could understand, but the page was incomprehensible to him. He read it more slowly and with an in stinctive 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 feeling of unutterable solitude came over him as it slowly dawned upon him that two centuries intervened 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 stranger in a world out of which all familiar objects had vanished. At last he remembered his own work, 83 My Study Fire 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 o 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 incomprehensible to him. He glanced at the fire, and its flames were strange ; they were fed by some ma terial 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 84 A Scholar's Dream 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 with inexpressible happiness. The little book was his own thought and speech ; not the outcome of his specula tion 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-remembered sen tence, 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 recently written, and seemed to be personal re- 85 My Study Fire flections rather than any formal com position. " I have come to a place in my life," said the unknown writer, " from which I look back upon the past as one looks over a long course from the summit that commands it all. I have attained a great age and great honours, as the world counts honours, knowing perfectly that achievements are relative, not posi tive, and that I am simply less ignorant, not more learned, than my fellows. I find myself everywhere 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 have said or written. I have given my life to the search for truth ; I have travelled here and there for new outlooks ; I have with drawn into deep seclusions for new in sights ; I have questioned all the sciences that have grown to such vast propor tions, and tell us so fully and so accu- 86 A Scholar's Dream rately of the methods of being, but leave us as much in the dark as ever concern ing 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 knowl edge, and now, at the summit of my years, with such rewards as the rever ence 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 mas ter 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 87 My Study Fire 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 spec ulations which seemed to dwarf it by their vastness. But I come back again to the goal from which I set out, to the guide who first opened the depths of my life, and who, through his own suffering, found the pathway into the heart of the mystery 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 cer tainly 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 volume and laid the little book in its place ; in his joy that any impulse from his own heart had touched and inspired another 88 A Scholar's Dream 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. 89 Chapter IX A Flame of Driftwood WE have been sitting to-night be fore a fire of driftwood, and, as the many-coloured 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 noctes ambrosian