To look on nature, not as in the hour

Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes
The still, sad music of humanity,

Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power
To chasten and subdue. And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:
A motion and a spirit, that impels

All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.

WILLIAM WORDSWORTH-Tintern Abbey

402. THE PROBLEM OF PROPERTY

When the communists ceased to be mere opponents of capitalists and were charged with management, they soon discovered the unreality of their rhetoric. They likewise discovered the futility of the hope that a system of equality in pay would draw forth vast productive energies. Therefore, they were compelled to negotiate with .craft unions and to reward skill and talent with extra remuneration. Of course, they said that this was all temporary and merely an introduction to the postponed millennium. That may be, but viewing politics from the standpoint of an experimental science, we cannot take into serious account dreams unrealized. The upshot of all this seems to be that in a modern industrial society, the problem of property, so vital in politics, is not as simple as it was in old agricultural societies. It was one thing for peasants to destroy their landlords and go on tilling the soil as they had long been wont to do. It is another thing for workingmen to destroy capitalists as a class and assume all the complex and staggering burdens of management and exchange. It is also clear that, as efficient production depends to a great extent upon skill, skill itself is a form of property even if property in capital is abolished. In short a great society, whether capitalist or communist, must possess different kinds and grades of skill and talent and carry on widely diversified industries. They may be temporarily welded together in a conflict with their capitalist employers, but they will be divided over the distribution of wealth among themselves after the capitalists have been disposed of. Conceivably a highly militarist government might destroy their

organizations and level them down, but the result would be the ruin of production and of the state itself. Even a communist could hardly defend his system on the theory that all must choose between military despotism and utter ruin.

CHARLES A. BEARD *

403. KING RICHARD'S DESPONDENCY

Of comfort no man speak:

Let's talk of graves, of worms, and epitaphs;
Make dust our paper, and with rainy eyes
Write sorrow on the bosom of the earth;
Let's choose executors and talk of wills:
And yet not so-for what can we bequeath
Save our deposed bodies to the ground?
Our lands, our lives, and all are Bolingbroke's,
And nothing can we call our own but death,
And that small model of the barren earth
Which serves as paste and cover to our bones.
For God's sake, let us sit upon the ground
And tell sad stories of the death of kings;

How some have been deposed, some slain in war,
Some haunted by the ghosts they have depos'd,
Some poison'd by their wives, some sleeping kill'd;
All murder'd: for within the hollow crown

That rounds the mortal temples of a king

Keeps Death his court, and there the antick sits,
Scoffing his state and grinning at his pomp;

Allowing him a breath, a little scene,

To monarchize, be fear'd, and kill with looks,
Infusing him with self and vain conceit

As if this flesh which walls about our life
Were brass impregnable; and humour'd thus

Comes at the last, and with a little pin

Bores through his castle wall, and farewell king!
Cover your heads, and mock not flesh and blood
With solemn reverence: throw away respect,
Tradition, form, and ceremonious duty,

For you have but mistook me all this while:
I live with bread like you, feel want,
Taste grief, need friends: subjected thus,
How can you say to me I am a king?

WILLIAM SHAKSPERE-Richard II

* From The Economic Basis of Politics, published by Alfred A. Knopf.

FOIL'D by our fellow men, depress'd, outworn,
We leave the brutal world to take its way,

And, Patience! in another life, we say,

The world shall be thrust down, and we up-borne!
And will not, then, the immortal armies scorn

The world's poor routed leavings? or will they,
Who fail'd under the heat of this life's day,
Support the fervours of the heavenly morn?
No, no! the energy of life may be

Kept on after the grave, but not begun!

And he who flagg'd not in the earthly strife,
From strength to strength advancing-only he,
His soul well-knit, and all his battles won,
Mounts, and that hardly, to eternal life.

MATTHEW ARNOLD

405. THE CHAMBERED NAUTILUS

THIS is the ship of pearl, which, poets feign,
Sails the unshadowed main-

The venturous bark that flings

On the sweet summer wind its purpled wings
In gulfs enchanted, where the siren sings,

And coral reefs lie bare,

Where the cold sea-maids rise to sun their streaming hair.

Its webs of living gauze no more unfurl

Wrecked is the ship of pearl!

And every chambered cell,

Where its dim dreaming life was wont to dwell,
As the frail tenant shaped his growing shell,
Before thee lies revealed-

Its irised ceiling rent, it sunless crypt unsealed!

Year after year beheld the silent toil

That spread his lustrous coil;

Still, as the spiral grew,

He left the past year's dwelling for the new,

Stole with soft step its shining archway through,

Built up its idle door,

Stretched in his last-found home, and knew the old no more.

Thanks for the heavenly message brought by thee,

Child of the wandering sea,

Cast from her lap forlorn!

From thy dead lips a clearer note is borne

Than ever Triton blew from wreathed horn!

While on mine ear it rings,

Through the deep caves of thought I hear a voice that sings:

Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul,

As the swift seasons roll!

Leave thy low-vaulted past!

Let each new temple, nobler than the last,

Shut thee from heaven with a dome more vast,

Till thou at length art free,

Leaving thine outgrown shell by life's unresting sea!

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES *

406. EITHER TOOL OR MAN

Understand this clearly: You can teach a man to draw a straight line and to cut one; to strike a curved line and to carve it; and to copy and carve any number of given lines or forms, with admirable speed and perfect precision; and you find his work perfect of its kind: but if you ask him to think about any of those forms, to consider if he cannot find any better in his own head, he stops; his execution becomes hesitating; he thinks, and ten to one he thinks wrong; ten to one he makes a mistake in the first touch he gives to his work as a thinking being. But you have made a man of him for all that. He was only a machine before, an animated tool.

And observe you are put to stern choice in this matter. You must either make a tool of the creature, or a man of him. You cannot make both. Men were not intended to work with the accuracy of tools, to be precise and perfect in all their actions. If you will have that precision out of them, and make their fingers measure degrees like cog-wheels, and their arms strike curves like compasses, you must unhumanize them. All the energy of their spirits must be given to make cogs and compasses of themselves. ... On the other hand, if you will make a man of the working creature, you cannot make a tool. Let him but begin to imagine, to think, to try to do anything worth doing; and the engine-turned precision is lost at once. Out come all his roughness, all his dullness, all his incapability; shame upon shame, failure upon failure, pause upon pause: but out comes the whole majesty of him also. JOHN RUSKIN-The Stones of Venice

* By permission of, and special arrangement with, Houghton Mifflin Company authorized publishers.

407. "THE MUMMY IN BELZONI'S EXHIBITION'

AND thou hast walked about (how strange a story!)
In Thebes' streets three thousand years ago,
When the Memnonium was in all its glory,

And time had not begun to overthrow
Those temples, palaces, and piles stupendous,
Of which the very ruins are tremendous!

Speak! for thou long enough hast acted dummy;
Thou hast a tongue, come, let us hear its tune;
Thou'rt standing on thy legs above ground, mummy!
Revisiting the glimpses of the moon,

Not like thin ghosts or disembodied creatures,

But with thy bones and flesh, and limbs and features.

Tell us for doubtless thou canst recollect

To whom we should assign the Sphinx's fame?

Was Cheops or Cephrenes architect

Of either Pyramid that bears his name?

Is Pompey's Pillar really a misnomer?

Had Thebes a hundred gates, as sung by Homer?

Perhaps thou wert a mason, and forbidden
By oath to tell the secrets of thy trade-
Then say, what secret melody was hidden

In Memnon's statue, which at sunrise played?
Perhaps thou wert a priest-if so, my struggles
Are vain, for priestcraft never owns its juggles.

Perchance that very hand, now pinioned flat,

Has hob-a-nobbed with Pharaoh, glass to glass;
Or dropped a halfpenny in Homer's hat,

Or doffed thine own to let Queen Dido pass,
Or held, by Solomon's own invitation,
A torch at the great Temple's dedication.

408. THE PERSUASIONS OF DEATH

H. SMITH

If further reason be required of the continuance of this boundless ambition in mortal men than a desire of fame, we may say that the kings and princes of the world have always laid before them the actions, not the ends, of those great ones, they being transported with the glory of the one, and never minding the misery of the other, till it seized upon them. They neglect the