I have often been haunted with a fancy that the creeds of men might be paralleled and represented in their beverages. Wine might stand for genuine Catholicism, and ale for genuine Protestantism; for these at least are real religions with comfort and strength in them. Clean cold Agnosticism would be clean cold water--an excellent thing if you can get it. Most modern ethical and idealistic movements might be well represented by soda-water--which is a fuss about nothing. Mr. Bernard Shaw's philosophy is exactly like black coffee--it awakens, but it does not really inspire. Modern hygienic materialism is very like cocoa; it would be impossible to express one's contempt for it in stronger terms than that. Sometimes one may come across something that may honestly be compared to milk, an ancient and heathen mildness, an earthly yet sustaining mercy--the milk of human kindness. You can find it in a few pagan poets and a few old fables; but it is everywhere dying out. '_William Blake._' APRIL 14th As it is in politics with the specially potent man, so it is in history with the specially learned. We do not need the learned man to teach us the important things. We all know the important things, though we all violate and neglect them. Gigantic industry, abysmal knowledge are needed for the discovery of the tiny things--the things that seem hardly worth the trouble. Generally speaking, the ordinary man should be content with the terrible secret that men are men--which is another way of saying that they are brothers. '_Illustrated London News._' APRIL 15th The women were of the kind vaguely called emancipated, and professed some protest against male supremacy. Yet these new women would always pay to a man the extraordinary compliment which no ordinary woman ever pays to him--that of listening while he is talking. '_The Man who was Thursday._' APRIL 16th Whatever the merits or demerits of the Pantheistic sentiment of melting into nature of 'Oneness' (I think they call it) with seas and skies, it is not and it never has been a popular sentiment. It has been the feeling of a few learned aesthetes or secluded naturalists. Popular poetry is all against Pantheism and quite removed from Immanence. It is all about the beautiful earth as an edge or fringe of something much better and quite distinct. Ballads and carols do not go to the tune of 'One with the Essence of the Boundless World.' Ballads and carols go to the tune of 'Over the hills and far away;' the sense that life leads by a strange and special path to something sacred and separate. '_Daily News._' APRIL 17th