There are letters from people who want things. Some people want things so terribly, that the crush of it is upon their pages. I do not mean autographs. Those who have a penchant for such matters have learned to make reply very easy; nor do I mean those who have habits. There seems to be a class of men and women who want to "do" literature for money, and who ask such questions as, "What is the best way to approach a publisher?" "What should a writer expect to make from his first novel?" "Do you sell outright or on royalty, and how much should one ask on a first book, if the arrangement is made this or that way?"

I think of such as the eighty-thousand-the-year folk. The detail of producing the novel is second to the marketing. The world is so full of meaning to the effect that fine work is not produced this way; and yet, again and again, this class of writers have gotten what they want. Much money has been made out of books by those who wrote for that. People, in fact, who have failed at many things, have settled down in mid-life and written books that brought much money.

But such are only incidents. They are not of consequence compared to the driving impulse which one man or woman in a hundred follows, to write to one who has said something that quickens the heart.... There was a letter on the desk that day from a young woman in one of the big finishing schools. The message of it was that she was unbearably restless, that her room-mate was restless. They were either out of all truth and reason, or else the school was, and their life at home as well. They had been brought up to take their place in that shattered world called Society—winter for accomplishments, summers for mountain and shore. They were very miserable and they seemed to sense the existence of a different world.... Was there such a world? Was there work for women to do? Was it all an un-mattered ideal that such a world existed? This letter achieved an absolute free-hearted sincerity in the final page or two—that most winning quality of the younger generation.

... Then, many people are whole-heartedly in love around the world. Letters often bring in this reality, many calling for a wisdom that is not of our dispensation.... It was from personal letters first of all that I learned of the powerful corrective force, which is being established against American materialism along the Western coast. There is to-day an increasingly finer surface for the spiritual things of art and life, the farther westward one travels across the States. It is a conviction here that the vital magic of America's ideal, promulgated in the small eastern colonies, will be saved, if at all, by the final stand of its defenders with their backs to the Pacific.

All our East has suffered from the decadent touch of Europe. Matter is becoming dense and unescapable in the East. Chicago, a centre of tremendous vitalities of truth, is making a splendid fight against the entrenchments of the temporal mania; but in the larger sense, all that is living spirit is being driven westward before gross Matter—westward as light tends, as the progress of civilisation and extinction tends.

The gleam is in the West, but it faces the East. It is rising. In California, if anywhere in the world, the next Alexandria is to be builded. Many strong men are holding to this hope, with steady and splendid idealisation.

But there is black activity there, too. Always where the white becomes lustrous the black deepens. On the desk before me on that same winter day, was a communication from San Francisco—the last to me of several documents from a newly-formed society for applying psychology. The documents were very carefully done, beautifully typed and composed. They reckoned with the new dimension which is in the world, which is above flesh and above brain; which is, in fact, the unifying force of the brain faculties, called here Intuition. The founders of this society reckoned, too, with the fact that psychology as it has been taught from a material basis in schools and colleges is a blight. One can't, as a purely physical being, relate himself to mental processes; nor can one approach the super-mental area by the force of mentality alone.

But I found the turning in these documents with alarm; that the purpose divulged was to master matter for material ends. This is black business—known to be black before the old Alexandria, known to be black before the Christ came. They had asked for comment, even for criticism. I recalled that psychology is the science of the soul, and wrote this letter:

"I have received some of your early papers and plans, and thank you. I want to offer an opinion in good spirit. I find the powerful impulse running through your effort, as expressed in the papers I have read—to play to commerce and the trade mind. This is developing fast enough without bringing inner powers to work in the midst of these low forces. They will work. They will master, but it seems to me that spiritual ruin will result. For these forces which you show in operation are the real vitalities of man, which used other than in the higher schemes of life—call in the bigger devils for man to cope with. When one begins to use the dimension of the inner life, before the lower phases of the self are mastered, he becomes a peril to himself and to others. I feel that I do not need to be explicit to psychologists. I want to be on record as strongly urging you to be sure that the animal is caged before you loose the angel. Also that I have a conviction that there are ten times too many tradesmen in the world now; and that office-efficiency is not the kind that America is in need of. I repeat that I know you are in the way of real work, and that's why I venture to show my point of view; and please believe me energetic only toward the final good of the receptive surface you have set out to impress."



28

THE ABBOT DEPARTS

One day in March, the Abbot said:

"You know that woods I was telling you about?"

"Yes."

"Well, my father bought it the other day."

... Something rolled over me, or within. This was a pervading ache that had to do with the previous summer. I had ridden several times to the Perfect Lane. It cut a man's farm in two from north to south and was natural; that is, the strip of trees had been left when the land was cleared, and they had reached a venerable age. Oak, hickory and beech—clean, vast, in-their-prime forest-men—with thorn and dogwood growing between. It had been like a prayer to ride through that Lane. The cattle had made a path on the clay and the grass had grown in soft and blue-green in the shade. In sapling days, the great trees had woven their trunks on either side of a rail-fence that had stood for a half-century. It was an approach to the farm-house that an artist would have named an estate after—or a province.

Then came the day that I rode toward a smudge in the sky, and found men and boys at work burning and cutting. The superb aisle was down. I turned the horse and rode back. I learned that in the fields on either side of the lane a strip of land, fifty or sixty feet wide, had been too much shaded so that the corn and oats had not prospered. Perhaps it was there that the cruelty of the narrow-templed Order made its deepest impression. God bless the fodder—but what a price to pay. They had burned the thorn and dogwood, felled the giants; they would plough under that sacred cattle-path.

Then I thought of the denuded lands of North America; the billions of cubic feet of natural gas wasted; lakes of oil, provinces of pine and hard-wood vanished; the vast preserves of game destroyed to the wolf and the pig and the ostrich still left in man's breast. The story of the struggle for life on Mars came to me—how the only water that remains in that globe of quickened evolution is at the polar caps, and that the canals draw down from the meltings of the warm season the entire supply for the midland zones. They have stopped wastage on Mars.

It was these things that came to me at the mere mention of the transfer of the woodland property. If it were going to be cut, I was glad I hadn't seen it, and certainly I didn't want to enter now.

"What's your father going to do with it?" I asked.

"Use it for a pasture."

"Isn't going to cut it—any of it?"

"No."

Always there had been something absolute about the Abbot's No and Yes. I took hope.

"Is it thin enough to pasture?"

"The main piece is. Better come and see."

A pair of rubber boots in the corner of the Chapel caught my eye and the wan light of March outside.

"There's everything there—a virgin beech wood—a few acres of second-growth stuff that has all the vines and trailers—then the stream and the big hollow where the cattle move up and down."

"Did you have anything to do with keeping it unspoiled?" I asked.

"My father didn't intend to cut anything right away. He might have thinned the pasture section a little. I asked him not to. When he saw the way I felt about it, he said he would never cut it."

There was a healing in that never.... The Abbot was not the kind to ask his father for unreasonable things. I had seen the two together, and had studied their relation with some pleasure. In the main, the father had merely to understand, to be at one with the boy.... It happened that we were alone in the Chapel at that time. I reached for the rubber-boots.

"I'll ride as far as town and put the horse up," said I. "Meet me at the far-end in a half-hour and we'll start the hike from there."

He was off at once. Chillness was still in the air, the land grey, clouds yellowish-grey and watery.

We slipped out behind the stores and outhouses to a field that had a stream running across—a stream and a hill and a band of oaks that still held fast to a few leaves on the lower limbs, where the winds could not get at them so freely. You can't expect to get anything out of an oak-tree without working for it. I have seen an oak-log softened to punk, the bark gone, having lain in a woodland shadow, doubtless for thirty or forty years, but still holding fast to its unmistakable grain and formation, though you could rub it to powder between the fingers. For quite a little way, we followed the stream which was swollen with melting snows, and then straight toward the wooded horizon line, the afternoon hastening so that we marched with it, hot under our sweaters, presently getting the stride of fence and ditch. The sun appeared at times milk-like and ghostly in the south-west.... That was the first time I saw the Amphitheatre.

We had reached the edge of the woodland and the height of land and looked over the wooded slope into a silent pasture-land, a stream winding through the centre. The grass had been cropped to the last of the Fall days, and in the recent thaws the stream had overrun the entire bottom, so that the lowland pasture was not only tonsured, but combed and washed. I looked up. A beech-tree was shivering on the slope beside me, holding fast to her leaves of paper white on wide and pendent branches; a smooth and beautiful trunk of bedford grey, with eyes like kine carved upon it. Then I saw that this was but one of a sisterhood—the mother-tree fallen. Across were oaks and hickories, and through the naked branches, a log cabin.

An enumeration will not even suggest the picture. Sheep and cattle had made it a grove of the earth-gods. We remembered the Spring by the cabin, and crossed to it. Skimming the leaves from the basin, we watched it fill with that easy purity of undisturbed Nature.... Now there was a fine blowing rain in our faces, and the smell of the woods itself in the moist air was a Presence. The cabin had been built for many decades—built of white oak, hewn, morticed and tenoned. The roof and floor was gone, but the walls needed only chinking. They were founded upon boulders.... I saw in days to come a pair of windows opening to the north, and a big open fireplace on the east wall, a new floor and a new roof.... It would be a temple. I saw young men and children coming there in the long years ahead.... Across the open field beyond was a forest.

"The big beeches are there," the Abbot said.

"It can't be so perfect as this," I declared.

"It is different. This is a grove—thinned for pasture land. Over there it is a forest of beech. To the west is a second growth of woods—everything small but thick. You can see and take things right in your hand——"

We did not go to the forest nor to the jungle that day, but moved about the rim of that delved pasture-land, watching the creek from different angles, studying the trees without their insignia. We knew the main timbers only—beech, oak, elm, maple and hickory and ash, blue beech and ironwood and hawthorn. There were others that I did not know, and the Abbot seemed disturbed that he could not always help.

"It won't be so another Spring," he said.

Altogether it hushed us. I was holding the picture of the temple of the future years—for those to come, especially for the young ones, who were torn and wanted to find themselves for a time.

"You say he is not going to cut anything from the pasture-grove?" I repeated.

"No."

There was ease in that again. We walked back with the falling dusk—across a winter wheat field that lay in water like rice. The town came closer, and we smelled it. The cold mist in the air livened every odour. It is a clean little town as towns go, but we knew very well what the animals get from us.... I was thinking also what a Chinese once said to me in Newchwang. He had travelled in the States, and reported that it was a long time before he could get accustomed to the aroma of the white man's civilisation. Newchwang was long on the vine at that very moment, but he did not get that. I did not tell him. That which we are, we do not sense. Our surfaces are only open to that which we are not. We must depart from our place and ourselves, in order to catch even a fleeting glimpse, or scent, of our being. The Abbot and I lifted our noses high. The post-office was thick with staleness that held its own, though chilled. I was glad to have the horse feel as I did, and clear out for the edge of the Lake where we belonged.

... We went many days that Spring. The town thought us quite bereft. We were present for the hawthorn day; saw the ineffable dogwoods at their highest best; the brief bloom of the hickories when they put on their orchids and seemed displeased to be caught in such glory by human eyes. I love the colour and texture of hickory wood, but it insists on choosing its own place to live.... We saw the elms breaking another day, and the beech leaves come forth from their wonderful twists of brown, formed the Fall before. Everything about the beech-tree is of the highest and most careful selection; no other tree seems so to have forgotten itself; a noble nature that has lost the need of insisting its demands and making its values known, having long since called unto itself the perfect things.... There was one early May day of high northwind, that we entered the beech-wood, and saw those forest lengths of trunk swaying in a kind of planetary rhythm. Full-length the beeches gave, and returned so slowly, a sweeping vibration of their own, too slow and vast for us to sense. I thought of a group of the great women of the future gathered together to ordain the way of life. There is no holier place than a beech-wood....

The Abbot's father repaired the cabin for us—put in the fireplace and the windows to the north. Many nights the Chapel kindred have spent there, in part or as a party; and it is the centre of the wonderful days of our Spring Questing, when humankind brings a thirst almost intolerable for the resuming of the Mother's magic.... We want it a place some day for many of the great little books of all time—the place for the Stranger to lodge and for Youth to come into its own. The Abbot's father who has made it all possible seems to like the dream, too.

... But the Abbot has gone back to school. I think it is only temporary.... He remained after the others some weeks ago, and said to me quite coldly:

"They have decided to make me go back to school——"

"Sit down," I answered.

As I look back, I think that was said because I, too, felt the need of sitting down. He had been with me nearly a year. I had found him at first, immersed in brooding silence. In a way, that silence was chaotic; full day was far from rising upon it. He is without ambition in the worldly sense. Ambition is a red devil of a horse, but he gets you somewhere. One overcomes Inertia in riding far and long on that mount. He takes you to the piled places where the self may satisfy for the moment all its ravishing greeds. This is not a great thing to do. One sickens of this; all agony and disease comes of this. The red horse takes you as far as you will let him, on a road that must be retraced, but he gets you somewhere! Inertia does not. The point is, one must not slay the red horse of ambition until one has another mount to ride.

The Abbot caught the new mount quickly. He seemed to have had his hand on the tether when he came. The name of the red horse is Self. The white breed that we delight to ride here might be called generically Others. The Abbot was astride a fine individual at once—and away.... He is but fifteen now. With utmost impartiality I should say that wonderful things have happened to him.

They said at his home that he has become orderly; that he rises early and regularly, a little matter perhaps, but one that was far from habitual before. They told me that he works with a fiery zeal that is new in their house; that he is good-tempered and helpful. I knew what he was doing here from day to day, and that he was giving me a great deal of that joy which cannot be bought, and to which the red horse never runs.

But the town kept hammering at his parents' ears, especially his former teachers, his pastor and Sabbath-school teacher, the hardware man. I asked his father to bring the critics for a talk in the Study, but they did not come. A friend of the family came, a pastor from Brooklyn. The appointment was made in such a way that I did not know whether he was for or against the Abbot's wish to remain in the work here. I told the story of the Abbot's coming, of his work and my ideas for him; that I would be glad to keep him by me until he was a man, because I thought he was a very great man within and believed the training here would enable him to get himself out.

My main effort with the Abbot, as I explained, was to help him develop an instrument commensurate in part with his big inner energies. I told them how I had specialised in his case to cultivate a positive and steadily-working brain-grip; how I had sought to install a system of order through geometry, which I wasn't equipped to teach, but that one of the college men was leading him daily deeper into this glassy and ordered plane.

The fact is, the Abbot had my heart because he loved his dreams, but I used to tell him every day that a man is not finished who has merely answered a call to the mountain; that Jesus himself told his disciples that they must not remain to build a temple on the mountain of Transfiguration. Going up to Sinai is but half the mystery; the gifted one must bring stone tablets down. If in impatience and anger at men, he shatter the tablets, he has done ill toward himself and toward men, and must try once more.

It appears that I did most of the talking and with some energy, believing that the Abbot had my best coming, since the hostility against his work here had long been in the wind from the town.... It was the next day that the boy told me that the decision had gone against us. I cannot quite explain how dulled it made me feel. The depression was of a kind that did not quickly lift. I was willing to let any one who liked hold the impression that the obligation was all my way, but there was really nothing to fight. I went to see the Abbot's father shortly afterward. We touched just the edges of the matter. As I left he assured me:

"The minister said that he didn't think the boy would come to any harm in your Study."

There was no answer to that.... And yet, as I have said, we have come up in different ways from the townspeople. The manuscripts that go forth from this Study are not designed to simplify matters for them, and the books we read in the main are not from the local library. One should really rise to a smile over a matter like this. The fact is, I said to the Abbot:

"Go and show them your quality. There's no danger of your falling into competitive study. Show them that you can move in and around and through the things they ask of you. We're always open when you want to come. You're the first and always one of us. You've got the philosophy—live it. This is just a mission. Take it this way, Abbot. Take it as an honour—a hard task for which you are chosen, because you are ready. Make your days interpret the best of you. Go to it with all your might. Feel us behind you—rooting strong—and hurry back."



29

THE DAKOTAN

It was a rainy Fall night. The Dakotan came in barefooted with two large bundles of copy. It was a bit cold to take the ground straight, but he had walked along the bluff for some distance in absolute darkness, over grassy hollows filled with water as well as bare patches of clay. One's shelf of shoes is pretty well used up on a day like this, and one learns that much labour can be spared by keeping his shoes for indoor use. Incidentally, it is worth having a garden, walled if necessary, for the joy of hoeing flowers and vegetables barefooted.... I had just about finished the work of the evening. It would not have mattered anyway. The Dakotan sat down on the floor before the fire and was still as a spirit. He has no sense of time nor hurry; he would have waited an hour or two, or passed along quite as genially as he came, without my looking up.

But one does not often let a friend go like this. These things are too fine, of too pure a pleasantness. One does not learn the beauty of them until one has come far through terror and turmoil. It is almost a desecration to try to put such things into words; in fact, one cannot touch with words the heart of the mystery. One merely moves around it with an occasional suggestive sentence and those who know, smile warmly over the writer's words.

The Study was red with firelight. Burning wood played with its tireless gleam upon the stones, upon the backs of books, and into the few pictures, bringing the features forth with restless familiarity. I left the desk and came to the big chair by the fire. I was glad he was there. I think I had been watching him intently for several seconds before he looked up.... I had not been thinking of Thoreau; at least, not for days, but it suddenly came to me that this was extraordinarily like Thoreau, who had come in so silently through the darkness to share the fire. I found that he had just been writing of the relations of men, the rarer moments of them; and queerly enough, I found that night more of the master of Walden in his work.

The Dakotan is twenty. All summer he has been doing some original thinking on the subject of Sound. When I was his age, Tyndall was the big voice on this subject; yet we have come to think in all humbleness that Tyndall only touched his toes in the stream. The Dakotan has spent the last few years afield. He is a tramp, a solitaire, a student at the sources of life. Things have been made easier for him here. He took to this life with the same equableness of mind that he accepted the companions of hardship and drudgery on the open road. Throughout the last summer he has moved about field and wood and shore, between hours of expression at his machine, in a kind of unbroken meditation. I have found myself turning to him in hard moments. Some of our afternoons together, little was said, but much accomplished. A few paragraphs follow from the paper brought in on this particular night:

"Vibration is the law that holds the Universe together. Its energy is the great primal Breath. Vibration is life and light, heat and motion. Without it, there would be blackness and universal death. From the almost static state of rock and soil, we have risen steadily in vibration up through the first four senses, to Sound, the fifth. The scope of Sound-vibration yet to be experienced by us is beyond our wildest imagination.

"Sounds are the different rates of vibration in all things. As yet we know Sound as we know most other things, merely on the dense physical plane. The next great discoveries in higher phenomena will be made in the realm of Sound. The most marvellous powers are to be disenchanted from vibrations as yet inaudible. The present enthusiasm over telepathy is merely the start of far greater phenomena to come.

"It is my belief that over ninety per cent of the sounds we know and hear are injurious, lowering, disquieting and scattering to all higher thought, to intuition and all that is fine and of the spirit. There is not one human voice in a thousand that is of a quieting influence and friendly to higher aspirations. The voice is a filler, in lieu of shortages of intellect and intuition. More and more, among fine people explanations are out of order. A man is silent in proportion to what he knows of real fineness and aspiration. Outside of that speech which is absolutely a man's duty to give out, one can tell almost to the ampere, the voltage of his inner being, or its vacantness and slavery, by the depth of his listening silences, or the aimlessness of his filling chatter. It is only those few who have come to know, through some annealing sorrow, sickness, or suffering, and draw away from the crowds and noises into the Silence, that become gifted with all-knowing counsels.

"There is a sound born from every thought, action, or aspiration of man, whether of a high or a low order, a sound not to be heard but felt, by any one fine and sensitive enough to receive the impression. From the collective, intuitive thoughts of attuned groups of men, thinking or working as one toward a high end, there arises a sound which is to be felt as a fine singing tingle by all in the vicinity. The work here proves this. At times there is an exquisite singing in the air, not audible but plainly to be felt, and a kind of emanation of light in the Chapel. We all lean forward. The voice and thought of one has become the voice and thought of all; what is to be said is sensed and known before it is uttered; all minds are one.

"... There are moments in the soft, changing, growing, conceiving hours of dawn and sunset when Mother Nature heaves a long deep sigh of perfect peace, content and harmony. It is something of this that the wild birds voice, as they greet the sun at dawn, and again as they give sweet and melancholy notes at his sinking in the quiet of evening. Birds are impressed from without. They are reasonless, ecstatic, spontaneous, giving voice as accurately and joyously as they can to the vibrations of peace and harmony—to the Sounds, which they feel from Nature. Animals and birds are conscious of forces and creatures, we cannot see.... Unless we decide that birds generate their songs within; that they reason and study their singing, we must grant that they hear and imitate from Nature, as human composers do. The process in any case has not to do with intellect and reason, but with sensitiveness and spirit. One does not need to acquire intellect and reasoning, to have inspiration, sensitiveness, and spirit. It is the childlike and spontaneous, the sinless and pure-of-heart that attain to psychic inspiration.

"Have you ever seen at close range the rapt, listening, inspired look of the head of a wild bird in flight? Has anything fine and pure ever come to you from a deep look into the luminous eyes of a bird fresh from the free open?

"... Study the very voices of spiritual men. They are low-pitched, seeming to issue from deep within the man; one strains to catch what is said, especially if he be used to the far-carrying, sharp, metallic, blatant speech of the West. Certain ancients were better versed in the potency of sounds than we are to-day. Study in occult writings the magic pronunciation of Aum, Amitabha, Allah, of certain chants and spirit-invoking incantations of old, and one draws a conception of the powers of friendly sounds and the injurious effects of discordant sounds, such as we are surrounded by....

"Many of us in the West, who are so used to din and broken rhythm, would call the Vina, that Oriental harp-string of the soul, a relic of barbaric times. But Vina's magic cry at evening brings the very elementals about the player. The voices of Nature, the lapping of water, bird-song, roll of thunder, the wind in the pines—these are sounds that bring one some slight whit of the grandeur and majestic harmony of the Universe. These are the voice of kung, 'the great tone' in Oriental music, corresponding somewhat to F, the middle note of the piano, supposed to be peace-invoking. In northern China the Buddhist priests sit out in evening, listening raptly to kung, the 'all-harmonious sound of the Hoang-ho rushing by.' One longs to be the intimate of such meditations."



30

THE DAKOTAN (Continued)

I first heard of the Dakotan[3] at a time when I was not quite so interested in the younger generation. A woman friend out in his country wrote me, and sent on some of his work. I was not thrilled especially, though the work was good. She tried again, and I took the later manuscript to bed with me, one night when I was "lifted out," as the mason said. It did not work as designed. Instead of dropping off on the first page, I tossed for hours, and a letter asking him to come to Stonestudy was off in the first mail in the morning.

He is drawing entirely from his own centre of origins. That was established at once, and has been held. The only guiding required, since he is a natural writer, has been on the one point of preserving a childlike directness and clarity of expression. It is not that he wants the popular market; the quality of his bent precludes that for the present. Moreover, he can live here on what thousands of men in America spend for cigars, but our ideal of writing has to do with the straight line between the thought and the utterance.

A man's style has little or nothing to do with the words, or the sentence, paragraph or even his native eccentricities of technique; a man's style has to do with the manner of his thinking. As for words and the implements of writing, the more nearly they are made to parallel the run of thought, the better the work.

One does not learn the Dakotan's kind in a day or a year. There is a continual changing and refining production about our truest friends—the same thing in a woman that a man can love in the highest—that quickens us always to higher vision and deeper humanity. The point is that we must change and increase to be worthy of our truest relations. One must always be restless and capacious. When our eyes rest on the horizon, and do not yearn to tear it apart; when the throb of the Quest sinks low in our breast—it is time to depart. You who in mid-life think you have arrived somewhere—in profession, in trade, in world-standing—know that death has already touched you, that the look of your face is dissolute.

I have said to the Dakotan and to the others here: "It was good for you to come—but the time may arrive, when it will be just as good for you to go.... When you see me covering old fields; when you come here for continual reviews of my little story; when your mind winces with the thought of what I am to do and say next, because you know it well already—arise and come no more, but in passing, say to me, 'To-day we did not get out of the circle of yesterday....' I shall know what is meant, and it shall be good for you to tell me, since one forgets. It may be that there is still enough strength for another voyage—that I may be constrained to leave Telemachus and go forth to the edge of the land "where lights twinkle among the rocks and the deep moans round with many voices."

Recently the Dakotan told me of a dream, and I asked him to write it. I think he will draw nearer to you, if you read the story that he brought me:

"This is the latest and most complete of many under-water dreams that have come to me. In their thrall as a child I learned the deeps of fear. I do not know why dreams of mine are so often associated with water, unless at some time, way back in the beginnings, the horror of a water-existence has been so stamped upon me that it has been retained in consciousness. As a child, water and strong winds drove me to tears. I can remember no other things that brought marked fear but these. One incident of wind, on a boat going to Block Island Light-house, off Newport, remains as vivid to this day as when it was enacted, and I was not yet five at the time. Every one wondered at these peculiar fears, but the explanation is plainer if one can look either back or beyond.

"Knowledge is but a glimmering of past experience. We are the condensed sum of all our past activities. Normal mind and memory are only of the immediate present, only as old as our bodies, but once in a long time we fall by chance into certain peculiar conditions of body, mind, or soul—conditions that are invoking to great reaches of consciousness back into the past. Normally our shell is too thick; we are too dense and too conscious of our present physical being and vitality, for the ancient one within us to interpret to the brain. Even in sleep, the brain is usually embroiled or littered with daily life matters. The brain has not yet become a good listener, and the voice of the inner man is ever a hushed whisper.

"The exceptionally low temperature of my body was the immediate cause of this dream. Here is a conviction that I brought up from it: I believe that any one by putting himself into a state of very low temperature and vibration, almost akin to hibernation, may be enabled to go back in consciousness toward the Beginnings. Evidently red blood is wholly of man, but in some way the white corpuscles of the blood seem to be related to the cold-blooded animals and hence to the past. Under conditions, such as sleeping on the ground or in a cold, damp place, these white corpuscles may be aided to gain ascendency over the heart, brain, and red corpuscles. This accomplished, the past may be brought back.

"It was a cold, rainy Fall night that the dream came. A bleak east wind blowing along the lake-shore, probed every recess of the 'Pontchartrain,' the tiny open-work cottage I used. The place was flushed like a sieve with wind and rain. It leaked copiously and audibly, and there was no burrowing away from the storm. I sought the blankets early in a state of very low circulation. The last thing I was conscious of, as I drifted off, was the cold, the low sound of the wind, and the rain beating upon the roof....

"There was a cohering line through this dream, every detail stamped upon my consciousness so deeply that the memory of it upon awaking was almost as vivid as when I was immersed.... It began very slowly with a growing perception of a low monotonous lap and wash of water and a slight heaving, lifting sensation, as of my being swayed gently to and fro. It was very cold, not the biting cold we know, but a dank, lifeless, penetrating cold of water and darkness.... The manner of my own form was not clear to me; I was of too low a consciousness to be aware of many exterior particulars. I merely knew I belonged to darkness and deep water. In fact, during the dream I had hardly a sense of being, except through the outer stimuli of cold and danger. These were horribly plain. That I was a creature of the depths and dark, a bleached single-cell, was doubtless a mental conclusion from the waking contemplation afterward. In the dream, I seemed of vast size, and I believe all little creatures do, since they fill their scope as tightly as we. The spark of consciousness, or life within, seemed so faint that part of the time my body seemed a dead, immovable bulk. No sense of self or body in comparison to outer things, was existent, except when a larger form instilled me with fear.

"My dream seemed a direct reversion back into the Beginnings, in form, consciousness, state of being, perception and instinct—everything—so that I actually lived, in infinitely dwindled consciousness, the terrible water-life.

"All was blackness. I possessed some slight volition of life that contracted in the cold. I was not in any keen suffering; I seemed too low and numbed to sense to the full the unpleasantness of my condition.... Presently there came a dawning light which gradually grew stronger. I did not seem to have eyes, but was conscious of the ray seemingly through the walls of my body. Slowly it increased, to a sickly wan filter of grey. It was light shining through water, a light which would have been no light to a human being. To me it was intense and fearsome, seemed to reach centres of me that were sensitive beyond expression. Though I was a mere blob, boneless and quivering, the ray was foreign and I knew what it was to cringe.

"And now I find the difficulty of interpreting the dream exactly from the point of the Cell. These things that I write I could not know then, except in smallest measure. As our greater forces are diminished by passing through the brain, these little affairs are increased by adjustment to man's waking faculties. From now, I shall give the picture as it appears to me from this distance:

"As the light increased, I contracted and sank slowly into the depths. The bottom was not far. I descended in a flowing, undulating fashion and settled softly on the water-bed, beside a large, up-jutting fang of rock. It was black in the depths. The cold penetrated all. Torpid and prone, I lay there numbed into absolute quiescence. It seemed that a torpid inertia, doomed to be everlasting, had settled upon me. I knew no want, no desire, had not the slightest will to move, to rest, to sleep, to eat, even to exist, just the dimmest sense of watchfulness and fear. It was perfect hibernation. I had descended into too low a degree of temperature and vibration to feel the need even of nourishment. I was becoming dead to the cold; everything was a pulseless void. I should never have generated an impulse to move again had not extraneous influences affected me after seeming ages had passed.

"The bottom on which I now lay was of soft, oozy silt; about me were rocks, slippery and covered with a coating of grey-green slime. Spots in the slime moved. I could hear it, or rather feel it—a sort of bubbling quake, mere beginnings of the life impulse. The tops and sides of the rocks were festooned with waving green fringes of growths, which trailed out into the water. Long, snakelike fronds and stems of whitish green, half-vegetable, half-animal, grew on the bottom. They were stationary at their bases, but were lithe and a-crawl with life in their stems, extending and contracting into the water at intervals, in a spiral, snakey manner. Their heads were like white-bleached flowers, with hairy lips, which contracted and opened constantly, engulfing the myriads of floating, microscopic forms.

"Upon the heads of some of the creepers were ghostly phosphorescent lights, which winked on and off at intervals as the stems waved gently to and fro. I did not have an instinctive fear of these. They seemed friendly. They lit up the black depths. They and I seemed of a similar bent; they feared the forms that I feared and contracted tight to the bottom when these enemies approached. There were certain permanent spots about me that gave off other lights at intervals. The whole bottom was a dim, vast region of many-coloured lights, or more properly, dim lambent glows, of blue, green and yellow, which winked and nodded on and off in the blackness. They seemed to be the decoys of the feeders that possessed them. Each glow lit up a circle in the depths and seemed to attract food to the watcher who waved it. They were all cold lights, mere phosphorescent gleams without the searching, penetrating qualities of the light I had first felt, and they did not bother me.

"... The ray was filtering down again. It was this that kept me alive. It increased until all above was a wan grey. One by one the many-coloured lights of the bottom winked off, the long feelers and contractile stems were drawn in, and the whole bottom became once more a motionless, dead-grey world.... Little sacks without eyes in that grey light, the gorging not begun, kept alive by the whip of fear. The low life would have gone on to death or dissemination had it not been for exterior forces which reached me in the shape of Fear. I shall never forget it—the Fear of the Black Bottoms.

"There was a long, hideous suspense, as the Ray held me, and the thing that I feared was not the Ray, but belonged with it. In the midst of a kind of freezing paralysis, the struggle to flee arose within me. Yet I was without means of locomotion. Through sheer intensity of panic I expanded. Then there was a thrusting forward of the inner vital centre against the forward wall of the sack. It was the most vital part of me that was thrust forward, the heart of a rudiment, so to speak. That which remained, followed in a kind of flow. The movement was an undulation forward, brought about by the terror to escape.

"Fear is always connected with Behind. With the approach of Danger I had started forward. There had been no forward nor backward before, nor any sides or top to me. Now a back, a dorsal aspect, came into being, and the vital centre was thrust forward within the cell, so as to be farthest away from the danger. It is in this way that the potential centre of an organism came to be in the front, in the head, looking forward and always pointed away from the danger—protected to the last.

"As I flowed forward, the sticky fluid substance of my body sucked into the oozy bottom. I spatted myself as flat as possible, seeming to press the tenderest parts closest to the bottom. And it is in this way that the vital parts of organisms came to be underneath, on the ventral aspect, protected from above by the sides and back. As the Fear increased, I gained in strength and speed of locomotion, the same parts of my form protruding rhythmically, faster and easier, until I did not need to concentrate so intensely upon the moving-act. Doubtless I covered ages of evolution in the dream. It is in this way through the stimulus of Fear that the rudiments of organs of locomotion were begun. And they came in the Beginnings on the ventral side, because that side was pressed close to the earth. Every sense, volition, reasoning power—everything—was generated and fostered by Fear in the Beginnings. So Fear is really the Mother of our first overcoming of Inertia.

"I do not recall being devoured by that creature of the Ray; and yet it seems as if half the life in the Bottoms was clutched in the torture of that danger. The other half was gorging.... Gorge, gorge, with unappeased appetite, body bulging to the bursting point, the Devourers all about me, the larger engulfing the smaller, not with mouths, but literally enclosing their prey with the walls of their bodies, so that the smaller flowed into the larger. And often the engulfed would be of greater length than the engulfer....

"There was a sound made by the gorging, a distinct sound born of gluttony, not audible, but to be felt by my sensitive surfaces, a sort of emanation, not from the gorgers, but born from the engrossing intensity of the gorging act. I shall always remember it, a distinct 'ummmmmmm,' constant, and rising and falling at times to a trifle faster or lower pitch.

"Always, as the Ray would cross above me, there would be a stoppage of the emanations from the gorgers, a sinking to the bottom, and a rising again. Also there were Shadows, sinister, flowing grey forms, that preyed about the rocky bottom. These were more felt by me than heard or seen, and instilled more deadly fear than the larger Shadows that passed above. The drama of the feeding seemed doomed to go on and on forever. Repletion would never have come to the Gorgers. Only Fear broke the spell.

"I recall a last glimpse of that ghost-life of the depths. About the rocks, the long snakelike stems and feelers were extended, and the luring decoys waved and glowed again at the ends of the stalks. With the cessation of the feeding, began the vaster, unquenchable feeding of the engulfing plants. It was steady, monotonous, inexhaustible—the winking and waving of the blue-green glows, the clustering of the senseless prey, a sudden extinguishing of the light, devouring—then the nodding gleam again. No mercy, no feeling, no reason existed in this ghost-region of bleached and bloodless things. The law was the law of Fear and Gluttony. There was a thrall to the whole drama which I am powerless to express.

"... The embryo in the womb eats and assimilates, all unconscious. With life there is movement. The first movement takes the form of sucking-in that which prolongs life. Then there is the driving forward by Fear from without. Low life is a vibration between Fear and Gluttony. In every movement is the gain of power to make another movement. That is the Law of life.

"I opened my eyes. The wan grey light of morning was shining In my face. I felt weak and unrested. There were puddles of water on the foot of the bed. The blankets lay heavily about my limbs, and circulation was hardly sufficient to hold consciousness. The effects of the dream oppressed me the rest of that day and for long afterward."

FOOTNOTES:

[3] H. A. Sturtzel.



31

THE HILL ROCKS

Our tendency is to return to the pioneers for inspiration.... I was thinking this morning how in all our studies we had passed quickly over the intellectualists, the simplifiers, the synthesisers and explainers—back to the sources of philosophy and sanctity. It is there that we find the flame. We linger and return to such men as Boehme, Fichte, Romini-Serbati, Froebel, Swedenborg. We delight in the few great and isolated names of Greece and Rome that are above style. We turn continually to the perpetual fountains of India, but seldom to Egypt.

We love the prophets of the Old Testament, but despise chosen peoples at every appearance; we delight in the lineage of the Messiah; we are stimulated by the Hebrew literature, by its symbolism, its songs and precepts, the Oriental colour of it, the hierarchy of its saints, the strange splendour of its women, but as a book of devotion its chief significance is that of a huge vessel prepared for the coming of a Master.

The New Testament is our first book. Manhandled and perverted as it has been by early writers, who still wanted Moses and laboured under the misconception that Jesus was expounding the doctrines of Moses afresh, instead of refuting many of them—yet the New Testament stands highest above all hands pointing heavenward.

In the case of the teacher here, it was not the so-called orthodoxy that accomplished this allegiance to the New Testament. Modern churches drove him forth into the Farther East. It was the return from Patanjali and the Vedas and much of that excellent and ancient wisdom of the Earlier Arrival, that gave him a fresh surface for understanding the pilgrimage and the passion of Jesus.

Our own Tolstoi has done much to restore the Son of Mary to a sceptical generation. To us Tolstoi's great work is not through the vehicle of the novel. Though comparisons are everywhere questionable, it seems to us that the Russian's task on the later Scriptures is as significant as Luther's. Certainly he has prepared them to stand the more searching and penetrative gaze of the coming generation. Many of the new voices rise to declare that it is doubtful if there really was an historic Jesus. Still the man matters less than his influence. His story is emphatically in the world; the spirit of it lives above all dogma and vulgarity, even above nationalism. It is the breath of Brotherhood and Compassion. It is nearer to us and less complex than the story of the Buddha.

Every such coming heightens the voltage of spiritual power in the world. The greatest stories of the world are the stories of such comings. Of first importance in the education of children is the institution of an ideal of the imminence of great helpers, the Compassionates. Children become starry-eyed as they listen. I think if we could all shake ourselves clear of the temporal and the unseemly, we should find deep in our hearts, a strange expectancy. A woman said, as we talked of these things:

"I seem to have been expectant for centuries."

When such ideals are held in mind, an adjustment of conduct follows at once. To be ready (I am not talking religiously) for a revered Guest, one immediately begins to put one's house in order. Indeed, there's a reproach in finding the need of rushed preparation, in the hastening to clear corners and hide unseemly objects; and yet, this is well if the reorganisation is more than a passing thought. To make the ordering of one's house a life-habit is a very valid beginning in morality.

We talk continually of the greatest of men; sometimes our voices falter, and sentences are not finished. We have found many things alike about the Great Ones. First they had mothers who dreamed, and then they had poverty to acquaint them with sorrow. They came up hard, and they were always different from other children. They suffered more than the others about them, because they were more sensitive.

They met invariably the stiffest foe of a fine child—misunderstanding; often by that time, even the Mother had lost her vision. Because they could not find understanding in men and women and children, they drew apart. Such youths are always forced into the silence.... I often think of the education of Hiawatha by old Nokomis, the endless and perfect analogies of the forest and stream and field, by which a child with vision can gain the story of life. Repeatedly we have discussed the maiden who sustained France—her girlhood in the forests of Domremy. It was a forest eighteen miles deep to the centre, and so full of fairies that the priests had to come to the edge and give mass every little while to keep them in any kind of subjection. That incomparable maiden did not want the fairies in subjection. She was listening. From the centres of the forest came to her the messages of power.... Once when the Chapel group had left, I sat thinking about this maiden; and queerly enough, my mind turned presently to something in St. Luke, about the road to Emmaus—the Stranger who had walked with the disciples, and finally made himself known. And they asked one to the other after He had vanished: "Did not our hearts burn within us while He talked with us by the way, and while He opened to us the Scriptures?"

... Returning from their silences, these torture-quickened youths found work to do—work that people could not understand. The people invariably thought there must be a trick about the giving—that the eager one wanted hidden results for self.... Invariably, they were prodigious workers, men of incredible energy. Thus they ground themselves fine; and invariably, too, they were men of exalted personal conduct, though often they had passed before the fact was truly appreciated.

First of all, they were honest—that was the hill-rock. Such men come to make crooked paths straight, but first they straighten out themselves. They stopped lying to other men, and what was greater still, they stopped lying to themselves. Sooner or later men all came to understand that they had something good to give—those closest to them, not always seeing it first....

You couldn't buy them—that was first established; then they turned the energies of their lives outward instead of in. The something immortal about them was the loss of the love of self. Losing that, they found their particular something to do. They found their work—the one thing that tested their own inimitable powers—and that, of course, proved the one thing that the world needed from them. As self-men they were not memorable. Self-men try to gather in the results to themselves. The world-man wants to give something to his people—the best he has from his hand or brain or spirit. That's the transaction—the most important in any life—to turn out instead of in.... Here I am repeating the old formula for the making of men, as if in the thrill of the absolutely new—the eternal verity of loving one's neighbour.

Each man of us has his own particular knack of expression. Nothing can happen so important to a man as to find his particular thing to do. The best thing one man can do for another is to help him find his work. The man who has found his work gets from it, and through it, a working idea of God and the world. The same hard preparation that makes him finally valuable in his particular work, integrates the character that finally realises its own religion. The greatest wrong that has been done us by past generations is the detachment of work and religion—setting off the Sabbath as the day for expressing the angel in us, and marking six days for the progress of the animal.

All good work is happiness—ask any man who has found his work. He is at peace when the task is on, at his best. He is free from envy and desire. Even his physical organs are healthfully active. The only way to be well is to give forth. When we give forth work that tests our full powers, we are replenished by the power that drives the suns. Giving forth, we automatically ward off the destructive thoughts. Our only safe inbreathing physically, mentally, and spiritually is from the upper source of things——not in the tainted atmospheres of the crowds. A man's own work does not kill. It is stimulus, worry, ambition, the tension and complication of wanting results for self, that kill.

Each man stands as a fuse between his race and the creative energy that drives the whole scheme of life. If he doubles this fuse in to self, he becomes a non-connective. He cannot receive from the clean source, nor can he give. What he gets is by a pure animal process of struggle and snatch. He is a sick and immoral creature. Turning the fuse outward, he gives his service to men, and dynamos of cosmic force throw their energy through him to his people. He lives. According to the carrying capacity of his fuse is he loved and remembered and idealised for the work he does.

A jar of water that has no lower outlet can only be filled so full before it spills, but open a lower vent and it can be filled according to the size of the outpouring. Now there is a running stream in the vessel. All life that does not run is stagnant.

There is a task for every man. We are born with different equipments, but if we have a gift, be very sure it is not fortuitous. We have earned it. It should make us the finer workman. But all work is good. The handle of an axe is a poem.

We would never destroy the natural resources of the earth, if we, as men, found our work. Rather we would perceive the way of old Mother Earth who turns to her God for light and power, and from that pure impregnation, brings forth her living things. We would shudder at all destruction and greed, and perceive as good workmen the excellent values of woods and coals and gases, and the finer forces of the soil. We would perceive that they are to be cared for; that their relation to man is service; that they have no relation to great individual fortunes. These are the free gifts from our Mother. As good workmen we would realise that greed and competition pulls upon, and tortures into activity, all that is insane within us.

The thing that brings men together in real talk, that makes the hush in Chapel or where talk is anywhere; the thing that clutches the throat, and sometimes brings the smart to the eyes—is the quality of men who have found their work, and who have lost the love of self. They are the conservers. They see first what is good for us to do and be. We follow their thoughts in action afterward, as water follows the curve of a basin. They go after the deep-down men; they dream of the shorter passages to India; they sense the new power in the world; their faces are turned to the East for the rising of new stars. Often they die to make us see, but others spring to finish their work. Our hearts burn within us when we speak of their work.



32

ASSEMBLY OF PARTS

Others have come; there are fresh wonders to me, but this book must close.... The development of each young mind is like doing a book—each a different book. Fascination attends the work. I assure you a teacher gets more than he can give.... Every mill should be a school. Every professional man should call for his own. A man's work in the world should be judged by his constructive contacts with the young minds about him. A man should learn the inspiration which comes in service for the great Abstraction, the many, from which there is no answer; but he can only become powerful and unerring by trying out the results of his offerings face to face with his own group. It should be as natural for a matured man to gather his mental and spiritual familiars about him as it is for him to become the head of a domestic establishment.

There is chance for the tradesmen to turn a little from ledger and margin, to the faces of the young about them—those who have come for the wages of bread. Many philanthropists would carve their names on stone, as great givers to the public. The public will not take these things personally; the public laughs and lightly criticises. Men who have nothing but money to give away cannot hope to receive other than calculating looks and laughter that rings with derision.

The time will come when matters of trade in the large shall be conducted nationally and municipally. The business of man is to produce something. The man who produces nothing, but who sits in the midst of other men's goods, offering them for sale at a price greater than he paid, such a man moves in the midst of a badly-lit district of many pitfalls. It is the same with a man at a desk, before whom pass many papers representing transactions of merchandise and whose business it is to take a proprietary bite out of each. He develops a perverted look at life, and a bad bill of moral health. There is no exception to this, though he conduct a weekly bible lesson for the young, even move his chair to a church every seventh day.

The drama of the trade mind is yet to be written. It is a sordid story; the figure at the last is in no way heroic. It would not be a popular story if done well.

The time is not far off, except to those whose eyes are dim, when countries will be Fatherlands in the true sense—in the sense of realising that the real estate is not bounded land, vaulted gold, not even electrified matter, but the youth of the land. Such is the treasure of the Fatherland. The development of youth is the first work of man; the highest ideal may be answered first hand. Also through the development of the young, the father best puts on his own wisdom and rectitude.

The ideal of education has already been reversed at the bottom. There is pandemonium yet; there is colossal stupidity yet, but Order is coming in. It would be well for all men meditatively to regard a kindergarten in action. Here are children free in the midst of objects designed to supply a great variety of attractions. There is that hum in the room. It is not dissonance. The child is encouraged to be himself and express himself; never to impinge upon his neighbour's rights, but to lose himself in the objects that draw him most deeply.

I have mentioned the man who caught the spiritual dream of all this, who worked it out in life and books. One of his books was published nearly a hundred years ago. It wasn't a book on kindergarten, but on the education of man. I have not read this of Froebel's work. I wanted to do these studies my own way, but I know from what I have seen of kindergartens, and what teachers of kindergartens have told me, that the work is true—that "The Education of Man" is a true book. Nor would it have lived a hundred years otherwise.

The child is now sent to kindergarten and for a year is truly taught. The process is not a filling of brain, but an encouragement of the deeper powers, their organisation and direction. At the end of the year, the child is sent into the first grade, where the barbaric process of competitive education and brain-cramming is carried on as sincerely as it was in Froebel's time.... A kindergarten teacher told me in that low intense way, which speaks of many tears exhausted:

"I dare not look into the first-grade rooms. We have done so differently by them through the first year. When the little ones leave us, they are wide open and helpless. They are taken from a warm bath to a cold blast. Their little faces change in a few days. Do you know the ones that stand the change best? The commoner children, the clever and hard-headed children. The little dreamers—the sensitive ones—are hurt and altered for the worse. Their manner changes to me, when I see them outside. You do not know how we have suffered."

Some of the greatest teachers in America to-day are the kindergarten teachers; not that they are especially chosen for quality, but because they have touched reality in teaching. They have seen, even in the very little ones, that response which is deeper than brain. If the great ideal that is carried out through their first year were continued through seven years, the generation thus directed would meet life with serenity and without greed. They would make over the world into a finer place to be.

* * * * *

I wonder if I may dare to say it once more?... It came this way in Chapel just a few days ago. There was a pencil in my hand, and something of man's ideal performance here below appeared more than ever clearly. I am putting down the picture, much as it came then, for the straightest way to write anything is as you would tell it:

"... This pencil is a man, any man. Above is spirit; below matter. The world of spirit is finished. The plan is already thought out there, to the utmost detail. This above is the Breath, the Conception, the Emanation, the Dream, the Universal Energy—philosophers have called it by many names, but they mean the God-Idea wrought of necessity in Spirit, since God is spirit.

"The world of matter below is not finished. Certain parts are completed, but not all, and the assembly of parts is just begun. The material world is lost in the making of parts, forgetting that the plan is one—that the parts of matter must be assembled into a whole—that a replica must be made in matter of the one great spiritual Conception. So long as men are identified with parts, there is dissonance from the shops of earth, a pulling apart instead of together.

"The many are almost ready to grasp the great unifying conception. This is the next step for the human family as a whole; this the present planetary brooding. Much we have suffered from identifying ourselves with parts. Rivalries, boundaries, jealousies, wars—all have to do with the making of parts. Beauty, harmony, peace and brotherhood have to do with the assembly of parts into one. That which is good for the many is good for the one; and that which is good for the one is good for the many—the instant we leave the part and conceive the whole.

"All the high-range voices for hundreds of years have proclaimed that the plan is one. The world to-day is roused with the Unifiers—voices of men in every city and plain crying out that we are all one in aim and meaning, that the instruments are tuned, the orchestra ready, the music in place—but the players, alas, lost as yet in frenzy for their own little parts. The baton of the leader is lifted, but they do not hear. In their self-promulgation they have not yet turned as one to the conductor's eyes. The dissonance is at its highest, yet the hour has struck for the lift of harmony.

"Look again at the pencil that stands for man. Above is the spiritual plan all finished. Every invention, every song and poem and heroism to be, is there. One by one for ages, the aspiring intelligence of man has touched and taken down the parts of this spiritual plan, forced the parts into matter, making his dream come true. Thus have come into the world our treasures. We preserve them—every gift from a spiritual source. Often we preserve them (until they are fully understood) against our will. The mere matter-models break down and are lost, for matter changes endlessly until it is immortalised, as our bodies must be through the refinement of spiritual union.

"Our pioneers, by suffering and labour, even by fasting and prayer, have made themselves fine enough to contact some little part of that finished plan. They have lowered it into matter for us to see—step by step—the song into notes, the poem into words, the angel into paint or stone; and the saints have touched dreams of great service, bringing down the pictures of the dream somehow in matter—and their own bodies often to martyrdom....

"Below the pencil is the world of matter, at this hour of its highest disorganisation. The very terror and chaos of the world is an inspiration to every unifying voice. Here below are already many parts; above, the plan as a whole and the missing parts. Man stands between—the first creature to realise that there is an above, as well as a below. All creatures beneath man are driven; they look down. Man alone has looked up; man has raised himself erect and may take what he will from the spiritual source to electrify his progress. Man becomes significant the moment he realises that the plan is not for self, but for the race; not for the part, but for the whole.

"I have written it in many different ways, and told it in many more. There are endless analogies. Thousands before me have written and sung and told the same. It is the great Story. We see it working out even in these wrecking days. The plan is already in the souls of men.... And what has this to do with education?

"Everything. The brain sees but the part. The development of brain will never bring to child or man the conception of the spiritual plan. There is a man to come for every missing part. Each man, as he develops, is more and more a specialist. These missing parts shall be taken down from spirit and put into matter by men whose intrinsic gifts are developed to contact them. Thus have come the great poems and inventions so far, the splendid sacrifices of men, and all renunciation for the healing of the nations.

"I would first find the work for the child. The finer the child the easier this part of the task. Then I would develop the child to turn to a spiritual source for his inspiration—his expectation to a spiritual source for every good and perfect thing. The dream is there; the other half of the circle is to produce the dream in matter.

* * * * *

"Education is thus religion—but not the man-idea of religion. It has nothing to do with creeds or cults, with affirmations or observances. It has to do with establishing connection with the sources of power, and bringing the energy down into the performance of constructive work in matter. Religion isn't a feeling of piety or devoutness; it is action. Spirituality is intellect inspired.

"The mountain is broad at the base only. There are many paths upward. These paths are far apart only at the base. On the shoulder of the mountain we hear the voices of those who have taken the other paths. Still higher, we meet. The Apex is a point; the plan is one.

"I would teach the young mind to find his own voice, his own part, his own message. It is there above him. True training is the refinement, the preparing of a surface fine enough to receive his part. That is the inspiration. The out-breath—the right hand of the process—is action, making a model in matter of the thing received.

"All training that does not encourage the child to look into the Unseen for his power, not only holds, but draws him to the commonness of the herds.

"... Many men to-day can believe in angels who cannot believe in fairies; but the child who sees the changes of light in the lowliest shadows, whose fancy is filled with little figures of the conservers and colourers of nature, shall in good time see the angels—and one of that host shall come forward (which is more important and to the point) bringing a task for the child to do.

"I say to the children here: 'I do not see the things you do, and in that I am your inferior. They shut the doors upon me when I was little, not meaning to, but the world always does that. That fineness of seeing went out from my eyes, but it is so good a thing that I do not want you to lose it. And always I am ready to listen, when you tell me what you have seen.'"



THE END



BY WILL LEVINGTON COMFORT

MIDSTREAM

... A hint from the first-year's recognition of a book that was made to remain in American literature:

Boston Transcript: If it be extravagance, let it be so, to say that Comfort's account of his childhood has seldom been rivaled in literature. It amounts to revelation. Really the only parallels that will suggest themselves in our letters are the great ones that occur in Huckleberry Finn.... This man Comfort's gamut is long and he has raced its full length. One wonders whether the interest, the skill, the general worth of it, the things it has to report of all life, as well as the one life, do not entitle Midstream to the very long life that is enjoyed only by the very best of books.

San Francisco Argonaut: Read the book. It is autobiography in its perfection. It shows more of the realities of the human being, more of god and devil in conflict, than any book of its kind.

Springfield Republican: It is difficult to think of any other young American who has so courageously reversed the process of writing for the "market" and so flatly insisted upon being taken, if at all, on his own terms of life and art. And now comes his frank and amazing revelation, Midstream, in which he captures and carries the reader on to a story of regeneration. He has come far; the question is, how much farther will he go?

Mary Fanton Roberts in The Craftsman: Beside the stature of this book, the ordinary novel and biography are curiously dwarfed. You read it with a poignant interest and close it with wonder, reverence and gratitude. There is something strangely touching about words so candid, and a draught of philosophy that has been pressed from such wild and bitter-sweet fruit. The message it contains is one to sink deep, penetrating and enriching whatever receptive soul it touches. This man's words are incandescent. Many of us feel that he is breathing into a language, grown trite from hackneyed usage, the inspiration of a quickened life.

Ida Gilbert Myers in Washington Star: Courage backs this revelation. The gift of self-searching animates it. Honesty sustains it. And Mr. Comfort's rare power to seize and deliver his vision inspires it. It is a tremendous thing—the greatest thing that this writer has yet done.

George Soule in The Little Review: Here is a man's life laid absolutely bare. A direct, big thing, so simple that almost no one has done it before—this Mr. Comfort has dared. People who are made uncomfortable by intimate grasp of anything, to whom reserve is more important than truth—these will not read Midstream through, but others will emerge from the book with a sense of the absolute nobility of Mr. Comfort's frankness.

Edwin Markham in Hearst's Magazine: Will Levington Comfort, a novelist of distinction, has given us a book alive with human interest, with passionate sincerity, and with all the power of his despotism over words. He has been a wandering foot—familiar with many strands; he has known shame and sorrow and striving; he has won to serene heights. He tells it all without vaunt, relating his experience to the large meanings of life for all men, to the mystic currents behind life, out of which we come, to whose great deep we return.

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- Transcriber's Note: Typographical errors corrected in the text: Page 59 Ile changed to He Page 81 quiesence changed to quiescence Page 132 blurr changed to blur Page 161 unforgetable changed to unforgettable Page 243 became changed to become Page 261 spirtual changed to spiritual Page 262 posessions changed to possessions Page 285 apear changed to appear Page 287 blossome changed to blossoms Page 288 enviroment changed to environment -

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