Puslapio vaizdai
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had perceived how altogether impertinent to their quality self-consciousness on her part would be. As with a gaze growing ever more serene and steadfast she continued to read my thoughts, her face changed, and from the look of a shy and timid maiden it gradually took on that of a conscious goddess. Then, as still she read on, there came another change. The soft black eyes grew softer and yet softer and then slowly filled with tears till they were like brimming vases. She did not smile, but her brows and lips assumed a look of benignant sweetness indescribable.

"In that moment no supernatural aureole would have added sacredness to that head, or myth of heavenly origin have made that figure seem more adorable. With right good will I sank upon my knees. She reached forth her hand to me and I pressed my lips to it. I lifted up the hem of her dress and kissed it. There was a rustle of garments. I looked up, and she was gone.

"I suppose immediately after that I must

have left the house. I only know that the dawn found me miles out of town, walking aimlessly about and talking to myself."

Hammond poured himself a glass of wine, drunk it slowly, and then fell into a profound revery, apparently forgetful of my presence. "Is that all?" I asked at last. “Did you not see her again?”

"No," he answered, "I never saw her again. Probably, as her father had intimated, he did not intend that I should. But circumstances also prevented. The very next day there was an explosion in college. There had been a Judas among my fellow-disciples and the faculty had been informed of the Positivist propaganda going on under their noses. I was suspended for six months. When I returned to college, Regnier had disappeared. He had of course been promptly dismissed, and it was rumored that he had gone back to France. He had left no trace, and I never heard of him again or of his daughter. I don't even know the name of the woman I worshiped."

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In sacred and solacing shelter and shade; in the solitudes silent and sylvan;
In songs of the sun in the shimmering leaves and the silvery sheen of the water;
In dripping of dews and the whisper of wandering winds and the fragrance of flowers;
In bloom-bended branches, that burthen the balmy and bountiful breasts of the summer;
In unwithered wilderness ways, where the wrongs and the wars of the world cannot enter
There waiteth the spirit of peace and of rest for the sorrowing soul that returneth.

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Like Beauty and Strength, from their slumbers arising, refreshed for their love and embracing,
So rise the fair towers that stand by the flame-figured gates of that slumbering city.
There, far from the fretting, the favoring forest hath fashioned a kingdom enchanting,
With answering arches and aisles that are filled with the gloom and glory of ages,
And columns that carry the uncounted years, as a crown of content and rejoicing,
Uplifting the great swaying world of leaves to the warm breathing wonder of heaven.

O light-loving battlements, walls, leafy-bannered, assailed by the gleams of the morning!
The bright, level spears of the sun strike and glance through the emerald shields of the branches,
The trumpet is blown at the door of the tent, but the lips of the trumpeter smileth,
And they that awake from their slumber and dreaming come forth, with a song, from the portals.
O beautiful battle, that blesses and kindles to life by the friendly assaulting!

O happy green streets of the city besieged by the sun and the strength of his loving!

Therein the young year riseth up from her couch, which is spiced from the pine and the cedar;
Fresh-robed, as an orchard in bloom, she appears, with the fragrance of dawn in her tresses,
Advancing with comely and confident steps, for she loveth the lord of the summer.
Her eyes have a light like the light from a fountain wherein the sky's image lies broken,
Her voice hath the sound of the music of waters, that lave the starred banks of the meadows,
And lightly she sighs, like the breeze that caresses the soft, silken leaves of the willows.

There love maketh gracious the laboring patience of nature's renewing forever:
The bursting of fettering frosts, and the waking from rigid and riveted slumbers;
The storms, and the rioting rush of the rains though the hills that reëcho with laughter,
The flashing of rays in the wide-dripping courts, the miraculous birth of the flowers-
That race which springs up from the fresh woodland loam, with the glory of God in their faces;
Divine and unchanged in their dateless descent, while the kingdoms of earth come and vanish.

O nameless, unspeakable triumph and glory, of strength that is loving and gentle;
Secure, indestructible beauty and righteousness robed in the purple unfading;
Bright-crowned, with the gems of the dew and enthroned in a circle of life-giving splendors!
O blessed and shadowless land of repose, which the dream of the summer enfoldeth!
The light shall not fade from thy green-bladed slopes, and the charm of the trees is immortal;
Unsullied, undimmed, as the light of the stars, in the fields of the silence eternal.

In sacred and solacing shelter and shade; in the solitudes silent and sylvan;
In songs of the sun in the shimmering leaves and the silvery sheen of the water;
In bloom-bended branches that burthen the balmy and bountiful breasts of the summer;
In dripping of dews and the whisper of wandering winds and the fragrance of flowers;
In unwithered ways in the wilds, where the wars and the wrongs of the world are forgotten
There waiteth the spirit of peace and of rest for the sorrowing soul that returneth.

Slow, slow, and faint the moving music grew,
And ceased at last upon the morning air.
I could have wept, so sweet it seemed, indeed,
If one might find forgetfulness and rest—
Might turn away from fretting, and be free
From torturing thoughts and loneliness, and grief
For songs unsung, and pain of lost endeavor;
Safe wrapped in dreams and in the summer shade,
Safe from the killing anguish in the heart,
Soothed by the murmur in the summer leaves,

Stayed near the gentle trouble of some stream.
Which wooes unceasingly the flowering shores,
There to lie down amidst the soft warm grass
Unvexed to rest, forever — satisfied.

Well pleasing, now, was that consoling song,
Well pleasing to recall the summer forest,
Now that the leaves were golden and the trees
As though within them dwelt far-seeing souls
That cannot find content in passing joys-
Shook off impatiently their shining robes,
Disdaining to be decked in mocking glories.

And well it seemed now, hearking of that song,
If one might bide, like that enraptured spirit,
To revel undisturbed in nature's beauty,
And never dread love's hunger in the heart.

Sweet seemed the picture of that happy land.
And there to dwell—so ran my musing thoughts—
With one I love to love me, evermore,

Then should no heaven, devised of gods or men,.
Tempt me away from my soul's paradise.

But lacking love, life lacketh everything.
Though it were set in everlasting beauty,
Amidst a realm, unfading as the sun,
Girt with resplendent glories, and enthroned
Upon the gathered riches of the world,
With angels clad in light for servitors,
All would be nothing. In the midst of all,
From the calm center of all circling fancies,
The changeless image of unruffled truth,
Like some pale specter of lost happiness,
Would rise amidst the glittering pomp and say:
"Fade, vain and curséd semblances unreal;
Where love bides not, the soul of life hath fled.
Unloved to live, is not to live at all."

Then to gray ashes would the fabric turn:
The vaulted grandeur changed to dreariness
Should hedge the wretched soul, as in a prison,
Gloomed like the soundless corridors of death.

Away, away, with mocking words, forever!
The level sword of truth sheers through the net
Of woven phrases, staying the keen point
On one unalterable, fixed decree.

Man must be blest in all, else is his life
A mimic play, which eagerly he watches,
Still courting blindness to the imperfection.

Recalling all the loveliness of nature —

The friendly fields, the streams, the whispering wood -
I questioned deeply of my conscious heart:
Quick came the answer, and I turned away,
Once more the endless conflict to renew,
To battle-and to dream of happy days.

Robert Burns Wilson.

TOPICS OF THE TIME.

The Lessons of Summer Travel.

VERY summer gives new reason for wonder in the elaborate preparations which look to making the way of the summer tourist easy. The magnificent hotels which await him in every direction, the river and ocean steamers, the long trains of vestibuled cars, seem to riot in conveniences which make travel a luxury; and every year brings some new feature into the class of things which are almost necessities. The tourist whose great-grandfather was used only to short excursions in the family chaise, with occasional stops at a wayside inn, must now have his fast train, with accommodations for every need or whim; he must eat, drink, sleep, dress, be shaved, and enjoy library and writing facilities at the rate of forty miles an hour. And it is at least doubtful, withal, whether the modern tourist really pays very much more for his luxurious progress than his great-grandfather did for his summer jaunt. The expenditure of a comparatively small additional sum nowadays makes the tourist free of a great travelers' association, whose membership, however shifting, may be relied upon with safety, so that the corporations which make summer travel their peculiar care may furnish luxury at the lowest rates. They are preparing for tens and hundreds of thousands; they may therefore give each of these a share in larger preparations than a prince could formerly have expected.

But the question remains, How are such preparations possible? Is everything to be accounted for by the twin facts that there are a great many more people in the country, and that there is a great deal more wealth with which to provide for them? Many observers seem to think so; they argue as if passenger corporations were more benevolent than they used to be, or as if the people had become "more luxurious." The former proposition is hardly thinkable. The latter is begging the question. Our people, any people, would be even more "luxurious" if they dared to be; and the real question is as to the influences which have already brought them thus far upon the road. One may find many such influences, but he may be interested in tracing the connection of many phases of this progress with the apparently unrelated phenomenon of the steady decrease in the rate of interest. Indeed, if he begins to follow out this one influence through all its ramifications, it will carry him far beyond his starting-point of mere summer travel, and he will be almost ready to conclude that there is no human being who has not a personal stake in the still greater possible changes from the

same cause.

The manner in which the rate of interest falls as the civilization and security of a country increase has been a familiar fact since there has been any economic discussion. Successive periods are marked by "waves" of lower interest. Seven per cent. was once not remarkable in our Eastern States; but period after period has seen the upper limit fall to six, to five, and even to four per cent. And such rates as these are for loans VOL. XXXVIII.—83.

which are in the nature of investments, in which he who loans the money is able to stipulate for somewhat higher rates because he is surrendering control of his capital for three or six months, or for a longer time. The more notable cases are those in the nature of "call" loans, in which the lender retains some control over his capital, and the borrower gets lower rates in consideration of his agreement to repay on demand. It is not very long since money could be borrowed in this way in New York City for one per cent.; that is, a borrower, by paying a little less than $3 per day, could command the use of $100,000 and obtain from it what profit he could make. If such a rate is abnormally low and temporary, it will at least serve to point the general lesson more sharply.

The most evident effect is the increased opportunities which are thus given in our times to individual ability. For the same amount of interest the individual can every year command a larger and still larger amount of working capital. Like the law of gravitation, this one principle is at work everywhere in the modern world, and under countless different forms; its peculiar interest for us is that our own country is the first theater of action on which it has operated at the same time on a people of great individual ability and on a country of boundless natural wealth, and the full consequences of such a conjunction are still beyond human speculation. We can only say that it accounts for the increased standard of private fortunes, without the implication of ideas of monopoly or extortion, or any other variations of Proudhon's theme that "property is robbery." It has given us our enormous modern productive establishments, with their saving of waste, their decrease of price, their increased purchasing power for everybody's money, and the consequent ability of everybody who will to devote an increasing part of his income to pleasure or to profit. It is ready to meet the demands of commerce by furnishing money for cutting through isthmuses, tunneling mountains, and spanning continents with rows of rails; and it is as ready to make every provision so that not even a crumpled rose-leaf shall mar the delights of summer travel. The observer who is content with attributing such phenomena to mere increase of population or of wealth will miss many a cross-light which the conditions of travel might shed upon graver questions, and in particular the force of that fall of interest which every year causes enterprises which once were impossibilities to fall into the categories of possibilities, of probabilities, of undertakings, of accomplished facts. It is, perhaps, the mysterious force with which Lytton armed his "Coming Race"-greater than that, indeed, in that there are no conceivable limits to its develop

ment.

This is not a case, moreover, in which there is any hazard in arguing from generals to particulars, from the great to the ordinary affairs of human life. If the change of conditions enables the great corporation to provide for its passengers with double lavishness at 633

the same annual cost, it is as ready to be the faithful servant of even the poorest, if he is willing to make use of it. It may not be able to raise him from the ranks of the hired servants to independence, but it will afford him the opportunity to make that or even a greater change in his personal position. It will enable him to build and own his house for less than he once paid for rent. It will set the wits of rich men at work for his benefit, as they endeavor to contrive ways in which he and others like him may safely borrow capital from them for such uses, at rates which, however low for the borrowers, are higher than the lenders can easily obtain elsewhere. It fulfills Richard Hooker's description of law: "All things in heaven and earth do her homage, the very least as feeling her care, and the greatest as not exempted from her power."

There are darker shades, it is true, to the picture. There is no means of confining the weapon of the coming race to hands that are always worthy or judicious. The increasing facility for obtaining the use of capital, together with man's inability to resist temptation, makes speculation every year faster and more furious, as it enables the speculator, by further borrowing, to postpone the final crash until it cannot but drag down numberless others with him. It gives possibility and shape to the "trusts" and other combinations of capital which are designed in any way to coerce the actions of other men; this is the force which gives them their opportunities for phenomenal profit or bankruptcy. And yet it is just this fall of interest and these combinations of capital which have made it possible to offer the higher salaries and wages of modern life: there was once a pretty general equality among salaries, while individual merit may now be gauged more accurately by its market price. The same force works thus beneficently in such cases, and is at the same time working to decrease the purchasing power of the estates of widows and orphans, to cripple the energies and efficiency of endowed institutions, and to compel the father of a family to work far harder and longer to accumulate a fortune whose interest shall be sufficient for the support of those who are dependent upon him. And yet who is to say that the law is blind, heartless, or cruel? From its operation there is no escape, either in innocence or in insignificance; but there is a remedy for it, that he who is affected by it should turn manfully upon it and convert it into an instrument for his own and the world's good.

Tipping.

WITHIN the memory of many of us the practice of giving small sums of money to servants was so uncommon in this country as to be accounted altogether a foreign custom. If the recipient of such an attention happened to be a full-blooded American, the chances were that his response would be marked by anything but a sense of gratitude; and the servant of foreign birth, if he had been in this country long enough to breathe in the inspiration of its environment, was apt to look at the incident from an equally American standpoint. There is little need that any one, in the height of this summer season, should take the trouble to point out in detail the changes which mark the present system. There is no longer an American sentiment on the subject. As employers drift into the policy of estimating

and relying upon tips as a partial substitute for their wage-list, there is no longer any place in the service for him who will not be tipped. Two of the three parties in interest, the employer and the guest, have conspired to get rid of the servant of the old school, and therefore it is that the third party, the servant, whether native or foreign-born, is much condemned to have an itching palm.

The most evident injury of the new system is on its social side, in the feeling of insecurity and injustice which it has brought into a large part of our social life. The born American never used to have any of the grudges against his richer neighbor in which so much of the revolutionary feeling of other countries has its roots. He saw nothing unnatural in the notion that consumers should be graduated into classes according to their ability and willingness to pay, and that each class should get what it paid for. If his neighbor, who paid twice or thrice as much as he, got hotel accommodations which were proportionately better than his, he had no feeling of personal wrong; he enjoyed his own contentedly, in the devout belief that the time was coming when he should be able to pay for and enjoy that which would be more to his liking. His confidence in his own future made him a believer that, even in such a matter as hotel privileges, he could ask in the long run no better test than open competition and the market price. The tipping system has changed his whole position. The grades of accommodations are no longer fixed by competition alone, but surreptitiously and by corrupting the servants. The ordinary guest must still pay the rates which are proper for his own scale of accommodation, but in addition to that he must now compete with his richer neighbor in tipping the servants, or else he will not get even the accommodations for which he pays. In other words, he must pay higher rates in order that his richer neighbor may perpetuate a system under which he may decrease his rates by bargaining in part with the servants instead of with the employers. Is it wonderful that the new system brings about a chronic discontent which used to be unknown ?

The corruptible servant can and will sell his services below their real value, for he is selling that which does not really belong to him, but to his employer, or to the guest whom he is neglecting because of a refusal to tip: whatever the price he gets, it is so much clear gain to him. So the larcenous servant can afford to sell napkins or tea spoons much below their market price. So the negro laborer at the South can afford to sell to the cross-roads storekeeper the stolen cotton or the farm products at a lower price than the lawful owner could have accepted. Public opinion makes the position of the "fence" or the collusive storekeeper unpleasant; why should it deal any more tenderly with the man who tips? The only point in his favor is that he is ignorant of the full extent of his evil work; and to balance this is the fact that he is willing, for the sake of present ease, not only to bribe a servant to appropriate to him what belongs to neither of them, but to compel employers to recognize this as a system of licensed spoliation, and to drive other guests into doing even as he does.

There is, moreover, a political side to the evil which is generally overlooked. The Romans held that it was beneath the dignity of a free man to take money in

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