of your eternal achieving, if we were not here on our holiday to appreciate, among other things, some of the things you have achieved?"

Thus, if we could discover a purely poetic and a purely practical person, might they reason together. But we can discover nothing so satisfactory to our definitions, and therefore let us conclude the discussion of the difference between them. It has led us to our own enda clearer understanding of the nature of poetic people, and of all people when they are in a poetic mood. They are lovers of the qualities of things. They are not engaged, as the learned say that all life is, in becoming adjusted to an environment, but they are engaged in becoming acquainted with it. They are possessed by the impulse to realize, an impulse as deep, and arbitrary, and unexplained as that "will to live" which lies at the bottom of all the explanations. It seems but the manifestation, indeed, of that will itself in a concrete and positive form. It is a wish to experience life and the world. That is the essence of the poetic temper.1

Children are poetic. They love to feel of things. I suppose it is necessary to their preservation that they should be, for by random exercise of their organs of feeling they develop them and make them fit for their

1 There is a poetic attitude to the practical life, and no poet is complete without it. It is expressed in these words of Peter Kropotkin:

"Struggle! To struggle is to live, and the fiercer the struggle the intenser the life."

But it is not that attitude which keeps the majority struggling, or keeps any man incessantly struggling. They are not concerned to receive the experience of struggle, but they are concerned to achieve their ends. This general tendency to achieve, to adjust-a primary impulse of life-is set off against the tendency to receive, to realize-a different and also, I believe, a primary impulse of life. Like all things in the world these impulses are rarely found pure, but they can be analyzed out and isolated for purposes of understanding.

practical function. But that is not the chief reason why they are poetic; the chief reason is that they are not practical. They have not yet felt the necessity, or got addicted to the trick, of formulating a purpose and then achieving it. Therefore, this naïve impulse of nature, the impulse toward realization, is free in them. Moreover, it is easy of satisfaction. It is easy for children to taste the qualities of experience, because experience is new, and its qualities are but loosely bound together into what we call "things." Each is concrete, particular, unique, and without an habitual use.

Babies have no thought, we may say, but to feel after and find the world, bringing it so far as possible to their mouths where it becomes poignant. They become ab4sorbed in friendship with the water they bathe in. The crumple noise of papers puts them in ecstasy, and later all smells and sounds, brightness, and color, and form, and motion, delight them. We can see them discover light by putting their hands before their eyes and taking them away quickly, and again, at a later age, discover sound by stopping their ears and opening them again.

Who does not remember in his own childhood testing the flavors of things-of words, perhaps, saying them ⚫ over and over until he had defeated his own wish, for they became pulpy and ridiculous in his mouth? Anything which invades the sense like cinnamon, or sorrel, or neat flowers, or birds' eggs, or a nut, or a horn, is an object of peculiar affection. It is customary in books about children to say that they care little for the actual qualities of an object, and are able to deal with it as though it were anything that they choose to imagine. But I think only the positive part of this statement is true. Undoubtedly their imaginations are active in more

various directions, and they draw the distinction between the real and the ideal in perception less clearly than grown-up people do. But the most pronounced characteristic of children is that they are perfectly free to feel the intrinsic qualities of things as they merely are. What we call objects are for the most part practically determined coördinations of qualities. And what we call the actual quality of an object is usually the quality which indicates its vital use. When we say actual, therefore, we really mean practical. But so far as actuality from the standpoint of the things is concerned, the children come nearer to it, and care more about it, than we do. To us a derby hat is for covering the head, and that is about all it is; but to them it is hard, smooth, hollow, deep, funny, and may be named after the mixing-bowl and employed accordingly. And so it is with all things. The child loves a gem with its pure and serene ray, as the poet loves it, for its own sake.

Nor is it only such qualities as may be said to give pleasure that he seeks, unless pleasure be defined as seeking, for he wants all experience. He wants all that he can stand. He is exploring the whole world of sense, and not rarely upsets his stomach and his entire system in a zest for the reception of sensations that are instinctively abhorred. Two children of our neighborhood will wear to their graves the brand of a red-hot scarf-pin as a testimony to that first love of experience. They did not want torture, I suppose, but they wanted to see what it is to be tortured. And so it was in varying degrees with us all. It seems to me, when I look back, as if we were forever out behind the barn finding out what something or other was "like."

It has been a vast problem for those concerned with

æsthetic and other theories, why people love tragedy when they are not in it. But if their theories would only allow that these organisms of ours, which have been gnashing and struggling together God knows what billions of years for a chance to live, have really an interest in living, there could be no problem. The problem is, seeing this wild zest for life, and life so tragic-the problem is, why people do not love tragedy when they are in it. And in truth they do. From the pure sweetness of early romantic sorrow to the last bitter comfort of an old man bereft, who mutters to his soul, "This is a part of the full experience of a man!"-from first to last, up to the cannon's mouth, and down to the midnight grave, the poetic impulse survives. We love to taste life to the full.

In energetic but idle hours it survives joyfully. And in youth these were the predominant hours. At all times we were ready for exuberant realization. We were not indifferent to the morning. We did not wake at the greeting of a last night's proposition in commerce or knowledge, but at the smile of the sun. The stuff of our thoughts was not sentences and numbers, but grass and apples and brown honey. Such excellent objects parading before our minds in a thousand combinations and colors left us no time to develop these general conclusions with which we are now filled. We could not banish our prairie thoughts from the schoolroom, though they liked it as little as we, and the hour of recess was the hour of life. And in the hours of life how greedy we were! Every sense was open with indiscriminate material flowing in. Our eyes trained for every seeing, our ears catching the first murmur of a new experience, we ran after the world in our eagerness, not to learn about it, but to taste the flavor of its being.

"Oh, the wild joys of living! the leaping from rock up to rock, The strong rending of boughs from the fir-tree, the cool silver shock

Of the plunge in a pool's living water, the hunt of the bear, And the sultriness showing the lion is couched in his lair. And the meal, the rich dates yellowed over with gold dust divine,

And the locust-flesh steeped in the pitcher, the full draught of wine,

And the sleep in the dried river-channel where bulrushes tell That the water was wont to go warbling so softly and well. How good is man's life, the mere living! how fit to employ All the heart and the soul and the senses forever in joy!"

This agility and fervor of realization extends early to the exercises of all the senses. And then as we grow a little older it comes inward, and we tremble to catch our own emotions on the wing. Fear, for instance, is a being of intense fascination, and even so impelling a power as the instinct of self-preservation is suspended by the poetic impulse-suspended in order that its own very nature may be experienced in feeling. Can you not remember the keen edge of a venture into the barn-yard, a tumultuous dash across to the corn-crib which offered a refuge impregnable to those mild-mannered cows? Anger is a moderate pleasure to most healthy persons, but in youth it is a thing to thirst after and brag of. It is life itself. Mulishness is an engaging state of being. Cruelty and mercy have often the same original charm.

I remember discovering insolence with exactly the same happy spirit of gratification with which I see babies discover light. I was profoundly interested in Nancy Hanks, who had broken the world's record by trotting a mile in 2.04. I believe that I was Nancy Hanks most of the time, and anybody who wanted to converse with