factures a good wheelbarrow. A perfect sonnet is rare. All the ages have produced only a few—some say not a hundred altogether. Yet a little group of Shakespeare's is of more value, has been of more use to mankind, than the millions of wheelbarrows. Yet the world could get on without sonnets, and it could not dispense with wheelbarrows? Yes: but that depends upon your idea of the world. To me a world constructed wholly on the wheelbarrow plan would be intolerable. It is bad enough with the sonnets mixed in."

In the progress of the world, whether in republic or in monarchy, the few lead and the many are led, often very slowly and imperfectly. The old lessons must be taught anew to every generation. It is not enough to say that "progress is in the air"; we must define progress with accuracy and promote it with patience as well as zeal. Patriotism, liberty, religion, duty, art-these may be in the air indeed; it is our business to put them into men's souls and lives. Philosophy is the guide of life; but philosophy is more than wisdom, it is the love of wisdom, and love is sentiment. It was sentiment that dominated the work of Jesus and Paul in founding Christian ethics upon the basis of love. The "ministry" to-day is service, and service of every sort must be consecrated by feeling for the served. The man of medicine, from Sir Thomas Browne and his "Christian Morals” to John Brown and his “Rab and his Friends," may become, and sometimes has become, even more than his fellow-worker from the divinity school, a messenger of intimate good to the individual and the home. American politics and

civics would have been poor indeed without the sentiment that shaped the constructive order of our constitutions and laws. Jefferson, with all his varied practicalities, was an idealist; and even in the cool papers composing The Federalist there runs, as through the ages, "one increasing purpose that is often a passion. Jefferson, in his first inaugural, spoke of " that harmony and affection without which liberty and life itself are but dreary things"; and Hamilton, in the opening lines of the first of The Federalist papers, made haste to claim that the settlement of the Union would "add the inducements of philanthropy to those of patriotism." Thus the leader, in any field, is he who, as in the Greek torch-race, holds in his hand a burning fire and transmits it to others.

In order to perceive to the full, the intellect must apprehend the wish as well as the fact. Still more is such perception demanded of him who would portray. Said Dryden of Shakespeare: "When he describes anything, you more than see it, you feel it too." That is why Dumas declared that the greatest of the Elizabethans "has gone to the bottom of everything, divined everything, said everything." There can be no divination without sympathy between the seer-and the poet is a seer in a double sense-and the seen. Hard and narrow is Dryden's famous

"Three poets, in three distant ages born,
Greece, Italy, and England did adorn;
The first in loftiness of thought surpassed;
The next, in majesty; in both, the last.
The force of nature could no further go;
To make a third, she joined the former two."

Dryden did not see, or did not say, that a certain lack of sympathy, of sentiment, in a way sets Milton below Chaucer or Shakespeare.

So much of art depends upon portrayal in painting, sculpture, music, words, that too much emphasis can hardly be put upon this truth. It is the business of intellectual leadership, especially in every form of art, to unfold or to interpret what men have missed or but half understood, in life or in its background of the natural world. "Art," averred Coleridge, "cannot exist without, or apart from, nature; and what has man of his own to give to his fellow-men but his own thoughts and feelings, and his observations, so far as they are modified by his own thoughts or feelings?" So Ruskin : "The grandest aim of imaginative art [is] to give men noble grounds for noble emotion." We move in a circle, or rather we receive and give; sympathy and sentiment perceive, art interprets, and the receiver of the artist's gift transmits that gift to others. If there is

"A motion and a spirit which impels

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

that spirit is assuredly something more than hard intellectuality. Intellect, after all, is human and mortal; soul is divine and eternal. Never in my life did this sense of the verities of the universe and the triumph of life over death come nearer to my mind than when once I stood on that hillock in Concord's Sleepy Hollow cemetery where rest, almost side by side, Hawthorne and Emerson, with

From their

the Alcotts and Thoreau not far away. graves the spirits of our first writer and of our chief philosopher of optimism rise to tell us that we too have our Westminster Abbeys and St. Pauls, though overhanging branches replace upspringing arches of stone, and the dome of the blue vault is substituted for that which Christopher Wren upreared. When such dust was laid in mother earth men said not,

"Death . . . adds

Him to his land, a lump of mold the more

but, instead, "Now our soil is consecrated, and made part of the universe of mind as well as of matter."

"The restless sea resounds along the shore,

The light land-breeze flows outward with a sigh,
And each to each seems chanting evermore

A mournful memory of days gone by.

"Here, where they lived, all holy thoughts revive,
Of patient striving and of faith held fast;
Here, where they died, their buried records live,
Silent they speak from out the shadowy past."

Shelley, I suppose, represented more than any poet of his time a sort of ethereal mentality in the nature of his imaginative genius. Yet it was he who said, in his "Defense of Poetry": "The great instrument of moral good is imagination. . . . What were virtue, love, patriotism, friendship-what were the scenery of this beautiful universe which we inhabit, what were our consolations on this side of the grave, and what were our aspirations beyond it, if poetry did not ascend to bring light and fire from those eternal regions where the owl-winged faculty

of calculation dare not ever soar?" Andrew Lang had the same thought in mind when he declared that "Coleridge is, or may be reckoned, a great poet, because every now and again he captures in verse that indefinable emotion which is less articulately expressed in music, and in some unutterable way he transports us into the world of dream and desire. This is a very vague fashion of saying what hardly permits itself to be said. We might put it that Coleridge has, on occasion, the power to move us, as we are moved by the most rarely beautiful cosmic effects of magic lights and shadows; by the silver on lakes for a chosen moment in the dawn or twilight; by the fragrant deeps of dewy forests; by sudden infrequent passions of heart and memory, and by unexpected potencies of imagination." Pitifully did Shelley and Coleridge-not less than Milton himself-fall short of Milton's declaration that "he who would not be frustrate of his hope to write well hereafter in laudable things ought himself to be a true poem." Literary men are as human as other folks, and a little more so. But sometimes the stream appears to rise higher than its source, because we do not really know what the artist's highest level is. "An artist's creations are the best . . . test of his nature. When we do not know all the facts of a man's life-and how seldom we know even half of them—it is dangerous to make what facts we do know overbear the evidence of his works." An author's book or a painter's picture, we may say, represents both the is and the would-be; and can there be an ideal without aspiration? Benvenuto Cellini was, as he has lately been characterized, a