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. a little older it comes inward, our own emotions on the wing.

And then as we grow and we tremble to catch 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 me or put me in a good-humor would begin upon that topic. But at last I became aware that I could do something quite different from being gratified by all their talk, and I was carried away by the discovery. My opportunity came during supper, at the gracious hands of a maiden aunt:

"Do you know who Nancy Hanks was named after?" "No," I shouted, "I don't know and I don't care a darn-see?"

My memory of the punishment which followed, and how I became aware that there are limits to profitable exploration in such fields, is dim, but of the excited pleasure of the adventure, and my underlying friendliness toward the old lady throughout I am quite certain.

They are great days when we first discern these powerful creatures in us, unnamed and meaningless monsters to challenge forth. Ghost-terror and dizziness and sick

ness at the sight of blood are among them. Imagine the mind of a young man who knows that there lies a pile of corpses the other side of a smoldering factory wall, and he both hastens to them and flees away from them, until finally this lust after the intense conquers, and he goes and gazes his fill. Do not call that morbid, but an act of exuberant vitality. For there is high-spiritedness in those that are young, not for sensation only, but for emotion. And this too they carry with them, some more and some less, throughout life. Rancor and magnanimity, lust and romance, rapture and even melancholy -drink them to the dregs, for they are what it is to be.

It is not only things of the sense and body that a child loves for their own sake, but at a certain age he learns to watch with wonder the paintings of his mind. When he is condemned into his crib, and has to face the loss of the whole lovely world in sleep, then this is the last resource. As long as God lets him, he will devote his somnolescent power to sensuous memory or anticipation, or just the circus-antics of grotesque and vivid-colored creatures that dance in before him unbidden, uncreated, unexplained. Even if sometimes he does honestly try to think, he finds that he cannot very long cling to the meaning of his thought, because he is all curious to examine those garments of imagery that it wears.

To most adults, I suppose, it is a bare mechanical or rational process to count from one to a hundred; but to an alert child it hardly ever is. It is a winding and bending over a plain, over a prairie, a slow climb, a dripdrip, or an odd march of marionettes, or perhaps it is just the queer sound of the words at his ear. At any

rate, the engrossing thing is to estimate the unique char

acter of the process and of each member in it. Eight is a jolly fat man. Six is sitting down. Some people say that they never had any of these pleasures, that they have no mind's eye at all. They cannot see six sit down. Let them try to comfort themselves with the idea that they are more scientific than the rest, not having vivid images to confuse their meanings in the serious business of reaching a conclusion. They are like the people on the ferry-boat who stay downstairs where there are few distractions and they can be perfectly sure to get across. Luckier than they are the people who can enjoy the scenery of speculation, who bring with them out of childhood a clear and spirited fancy.

66 -Great God! I'd rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;

Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn."

The final appearance of the poetic impulse, its intellectual appearance, is also at its height in youth. It is well known that at a certain period, if they are healthy and have a little self-dependence, young persons fall in love with all kinds of unusual ideas. They come forward with an amazing belief, a wise or foolish theory, which they attach to for its own sake, and not out of regard for its practical or real consequence. They take a taste of atheism, anarchism, asceticism, Hindoo philosophy, pessimism, Christianity, or anything that offers a good flavor of radical faith. This is only the same zest for experience. And it will need but a glance at life and literature to prove that such attachment to ideas, with small regard for their meaning in conduct, is not con

fined to the young. It is a poetic pleasure that people bring with them perhaps farther than any of the others. For most of these pleasures, and especially the more simple and innocent, they soon leave behind, as though it were somehow unworthy to be childlike and love things for their own sake.

We have a superstition prevailing in our homes that the first thing to do upon the appearance of a child is to bring it up. And we see children brought up in the utmost haste by persons who have purchased their own maturity at a cost of all native and fresh joy in anything available. But could we only realize how far the youthful pleasure in every poignant realization is above the accidents of fortune, we should take as great pains to preserve that as to erect the man in our offspring. We should ourselves long to be born again and maintain for the future a more equable union of the practical and poetic in our character.

That such a union is attainable the lives of the greatest show. It is possible to keep throughout a life not wholly disordered, or idle, or cast loose from the general drift of achievement, a spirit fresh to the world. The thought brings us back to Eschylus, a man of heroic proportions who achieved, in an age of turmoil and war, a life filled wonderfully with realizations that were final, the fruit of evolution, and yet not wanting the excellence of great action directed toward a further end. With the participation of that poetic hero in the campaign of defense against the Persians, and in the battles of Salamis and Marathon, it seems as if Nature had indeed achieved her aim. There experience was at its height, but purpose was unshaken. The little library and piazza poets and esteemers of poetry in these days of art will do well to remember the great Greek who died the most renowned