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"Give me a thought," said Richter, "that I may refresh myself"; and in that memorable saying is a hint of one of the sure ways of quietness and freshening that is at the command of all, even the most humbly circumstanced. It was not always so. Time was when books were for the few; but the rise and progress of the art of printing have made them almost as common as the sunlight and the air. This is the most obvious contribution of practical science to the intellectual and moral life of man. What travels can we go upon by land or sea that give to us such new and wide horizons as do many books, as do the greatest most efficiently? In Keats's sonnet upon reading Chapman's "Homer," you have my thought transfigured and made perfect for all time :

"Much have I travelled in the realms of gold,
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told
That deep-browed Homer ruled as his demesne.
Yet did I never breathe its pure serene

Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortes when with eagle eyes
He stared at the Pacific and all his men
Looked at each other with a wild surmise
Silent, upon a peak in Darien."

It is always the great masters of literature who have for us the most of quiet and of freshening. They speak to us out of a great, deep calm; and they imbue us with their spirit. It is not the newest books that are the freshest, or that have in them the most of freshening for us. Homer is fresher than the morning paper; Shakspere, than the latest novel. The intellectual vice of our immediate time, and one which is sometimes aggravated by our summer schools, Chautauqua circles, and similar appliances, in the exercise of their abundant good, is a mere touch and go acquaintance with a hundred different things, when what is needed for the steadiness and poise and calm of life is a close and intimate and

deep acquaintance with a few things, it may be only one, whatever pleasant smattering there may be beside. One must snuggle down into the heart of Shakspere or Homer or Dante, like a bee into a flower, to get their utmost sweetness. And by this I do not mean that one must go to them in that microscopic fashion which is so common in our day, with the intention and resolve to find wonders everywhere and to magnify the grossest faults, as some, have done with Browning, into excellences and virtues of the highest rank. There is healthy and unhealthy admiration. I have met this summer with a very rare and beautiful example of the healthy kind in Edward Fitzgerald, whose translation of Omar Khayyám is as likely to become a classic as any original poem of our time. No man ever allowed himself more freely the delights of admiration; and yet with his most eager and abiding admirations there always went a certain noble energy of resistance and appeal. He always reserved the right to find fault, though it were with Eschylus or Sophocles or Shakspere; and he exercised it with a manly freedom.

There could not be a greater fallacy than that all literature, as such, is freshening and quieting. It is written in George Eliot's "Spanish Gypsy," — I quote the thought, but not the phrase,

"There are winds that blow

That set men's knives to stabbing, which else
Were honest knives, cutting but garlic."

They

There are books which have a like disquieting effect. blow upon our spirits like the mistral or sirocco, chilling us to the bone or parching lips and tongue with dusty heat. There are men of unquestionable power and genius, like Balzac, for example, who have this effect on us. But, happily, the men who quiet us and freshen us are not few or hard to find. Their name is legion. Scott is one of them, and Montaigne another, and Charles Lamb, forever blessed, is another. The poets of the century have been strong in this respect. What worlds of peace and quietness

there are in Wordsworth and in Matthew Arnold, father and son after the spirit, for those who know them well! while of Tennyson it might be said, as he has written of the Lotoseaters' land: —

"There is sweet music here that softer falls

Than petals from blown roses on the grass,
Or night-dews on still waters between walls
Of shadowy granite in a gleaming pass;
Music that gentlier on the spirit lies
Than tired eyelids upon tired eyes;

Music that brings sweet sleep down from the blissful skies."

We of America have been wonderfully fortunate in having had upon the very threshold of our national literature a band of poets who have had to a remarkable degree the gift of freshening. They have all stirred us when we needed to be stirred. Equally they have stilled us when we needed to be stilled. I would place on Longfellow's monument, when it is erected on the Cambridge meadows, the most precious Latin words I know,- Datur hora quieta, "The hour of quiet is given"; for I believe that he has given to the Englishspeaking world of America and England and her islands of the sea more sanely, sweetly, nobly quiet hours than any other poet of our time.

If the literature of the immediate present is for the most part disquieted in vain, there are oases in the desert. We come upon one of them whenever we come upon one of Sarah Orne Jewett's books or stories. We came upon one this summer, called "Passe Rose." A very notable one was Dr. Edward Emerson's book, called "Emerson in Concord." Another was 66 The Story of William and Lucy Smith." Indeed, I do not know of any books that are more freshening and quieting than the biographies of noble persons, especially of such as kept a heart of peace, like Lydia Maria Child, without the least withdrawal from the time's all-pressing need, or of such as have been held steady and firm, as Darwin was, by the life-long attraction of a great idea.

It goes almost without the saying that there is no garden of refreshment like a well-ordered, beautiful, and happy home.

And a home may be all this without any great expenditure of money. You and I have known many that were all this in very narrow quarters, with the plainest clothes and fare. The faith that children are a blessing from the Lord is not yet wholly dead upon the earth; and there are fathers and mothers who from their children's faces, from their soft, dimpled flesh, from their tight-folding arms, get more of music, poetry, and art than others sometimes get from all the concerts, libraries, and galleries that minister to the æsthetic mind. At the same time, happy are they who can enhance the natural sweetness of domestic life by gifts of art and song. I often wonder if the members of a family in which there is a common love of music know what a bond of sympathy and mutual fidelity they have that others lack. Better, much better, than nothing was the old-time singing over of the Sunday hymns between the daylight and the dark. Old Milton's organ was a noble refuge from the sorrows and the disappointments of his life. One who can play the organ or at will can listen to the playing of a friend ought to be able to put his cares and worries underneath his feet more easily than other men.

That word," a friend," suggests another source of quietness and freshening. Happy are they for whom these are incarnate in some man or woman whom they can call by this exalted name. It is not every friend, not every good and true and noble friend, who can dispense these gifts. And it is better so. Faithful are the wounds of a friend, the spurs that prick the sides of our intent when we are dull of sense and heart and will. Thank heaven for friends who rouse us, shake us, pull us to our feet, and drag us forth with them to do some task of human service greatly needing to be done! But these are not sufficient for our every need. There are times when we are hot and tired and overborne with many troubles and anxieties; and then happy are we, if we can go to those whose strength is to sit still, who have the gift of peace. The chances are they will be men and women who have had much care and trouble of their

own, but whose calamities at length are overpast, whom the spirit has brought out into a large place, who have attained to a serene and holy trust in God and in the good of life, and who impart this trust to others, not, in the shape of maxims neatly turned, but as an influence which cannot be detected or escaped.

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We live by admiration, hope, and love," as Wordsworth said, no doubt, but by memory no less. There are no greener pastures, there are no stiller waters, than those which we call blessed memory and happy recollection. Especially, as we face the sunset and go down the western slope of life, these things have more and more to do with our peace, our satisfaction, and our joy. But the application of this preaching is less to the old than to the young, to all those who have it in their power to touch their own or others' lives to finer issues. We are like those who plant in youth trees under which they will sit down in age in the soft shadows, or which shall shield their children from the glare of noon. Alas that oftentimes the trees we plant are of some Upas sort, whose exudations poison all the air of recollection with intolerable regret ! "Rejoice, O young man, in thy youth, . . . and walk in the ways of thine heart, and in the sight of thine eyes; but know thou, that for all these things God will bring thee into judgment." Not after death, but in the solemn court of age, in which Memory brings the accusation, and Conscience is the awful judge.

"Always young for Liberty," said Dr. Channing, when hist elation over the French Revolution of 1830 made his heart leap up, to the astonishment of his more sober friends. The implication of the story is that there is nothing better than devotion to an ideal of character or work, than consecration to some great and glorious end of truth or righteousness, to keep alive the heart of youth, to breed perennial freshness in the mind and heart. "Still nursing the unconquerable hope, still clutching the inviolable shade with a free onward impulse," that is the history of thousands whose old age has been or is more fresh and hale than the dull, sheepish,

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