Up vistaed hopes I sped;
And shot precipitated

Adown Titanic glooms of chasmed fears,
From those strong feet that followed, followed after.
But with unhurrying chase,
And unperturbed pace,

Deliberate speed, majestic instancy,

They beat- and a Voice beat

More instant than the Feet

"All things betray thee, who betrayest Me."

Probably more people know Mr. R. W. Gilder by his two quatrains, beginning

If Jesus Christ is a man,

than by anything else that he has written. The quaint dogmatism of the late T. E. Brown's "My Garden" is likely to be remembered far longer than that gifted Manxman's inspiring "Letters."

A garden is a lovesome thing, God wot!

Of

peace; and yet the fool

Contends that God is not

Not God! in gardens when the eve is cool?

Nay, but I have a sign;

"T is very sure God walks in mine.

This same assurance of the essential soundness of the Universe, its possession by a rational Spirit, and man's capacity to dominate it in the interests of his completer life, goes far to account for the appeal which Robert Louis Stevenson and Mr. Kipling have

made to the present generation. Stevenson, though the master of prose, was but an indifferent poet; he had his share of contact with the world's rough hand, to say nothing of his long struggle to make an ailing body do a full day's work. Yet it would be hard to surpass the buoyancy and zest with which he met experience, or to overemphasize his assurance that faith was needful to life. His confession of this faith is famous:

For still the Lord is Lord of might;
In deeds, in deeds, He takes delight;
The plough, the spear, the laden barks,
The field, the founded city marks;
He marks the smiler of the streets,
The singer upon garden seats;
He sees the climber in the rocks;
To Him the shepherd folds his flocks.
For those He loves that underprop
With daily virtues Heaven's top,
And bear the falling sky with ease,
Unfrowning caryatides.

Mr. Kipling's McAndrew singing to his engine's music of

"Law, Order, Duty an' Restraint, Obedience, Discipline!" joins in the same chorus; and even the common soldier with his inappeaseable hunger

For to admire and for to see,

bears witness to man's power to rule circumstance, if he have faith enough.

The conclusion of the whole matter has been

luminously stated by Mr. A. H. Crauford in his 'Enigmas of the Spiritual Life."

66

"Poetry is as music come to itself, rallying from its divine trance, and vainly endeavouring to por tray those sacred and awful things which it is not lawful for a man to utter. The very root or spring of poetry is an abiding discontent with the actual and a quenchless longing for the Ideal. . . . Revolt against what is thought to be religion may inspire a great poem, as it inspired Lucretius and Shelley; but acquiescence in the vanishing of religion is fatally depressing to poets. Gods are needed if only to be defied. The Sublime may live in apparent antagonism to the Infinite; but it cannot live in the absence of the Infinite. Poetry must invent a God if none really exists."

And so must Life.

CHAPTER XV

THE NEWER FICTION. I

At a recent meeting of the American Historical Association, the learned President, Professor G. B. Adams of Yale, chose as the theme of his annual address," History and the Philosophy of History." The speaker belongs to a school of investigators many of whom have gone so far in their suspicion of generalization, their contempt of style, and their worship of barefacts,' as to hasten a reaction that was bound to come. Let me not however seem to bring a railing accusation against Professor Adams himself. The significant thing about the address was his recognition of the impending change, and the welcome, albeit a lugubrious welcome, which he extended to it. With real generosity, though it was the generosity of a much-enduring and chastened spirit, he admitted the gnawing hunger of men for the meaning of things. Caspar at his cottage door reiterating the fact of Marlborough's triumph can no longer quite ignore little Peterkin, with his insistent "What good came of it at last?" Nay, he must even be civil on occasion to Wilhelmine's dogmatic, " Why, 't was a very wicked thing!" Neither Peterkin nor Wilhelmine is, if I interpret this address aright, persona grata

to Professor Adams and his fellows; but the time is coming when they must be not merely endured but recognized. History must take account of them, perhaps be delivered for a time into the hands of those who share their possession by the demons of philosophy; as St. Paul delivered Hymenæus and Alexander unto Satan until they should learn not to blaspheme.

I would not speak lightly of the labours of the historical investigator. His research is of course a prime factor in the great and too little esteemed branch of learning to which he devotes himself. But the fact remains that it is a part of the historian's duty to interpret as well as to depict; and, if he insist upon remaining a mere annalist or editor, he will have no reason to complain when the mass of intelligent men desert him for the sociologist and political economist. Every intellectual calling tends to develop the scribe, and to degenerate under his hand into a sort of game which none but the initiated can play. The field of Biblical criticism offers perhaps the most notable illustration of this tendency to-day; but every path of technical learning is likely to lead us into a similar desert of professionalism, where we shall cease to be the masters of ideas and become mere servants of convention. The danger which lurks in "settling Hoti's business" is that there shall seem to be no worthy business but Hoti's in the world.'

1 In general, explanatory notes are fatal to the force of literary