What of the literature that only reaches the grave and there halts, unable to go further? Is it not the literature of children, useful only to amuse and entertain them in idle hours? She had adored the art of letters, had made a fetich of it, paying homage to its great names and walking in its fair gardens with reverent steps. Now she asked herself what literature had done for the voiceless army of the dead. What representation had they in its pages? The dead, the sacred dead, the beloved dead, what had letters done to bridge the stream that separates them from the living? Poets had sent them to a far-off heaven or plunged them into a flaming hell to suit their moods and meters. Romancers had used them as spectres to come upon the scene at inopportune moments and treat their readers to thrills. They were flippantly spoken of as “spooks,” “ghosts,” “apparitions,” and “supernatural appearances.” They were good stock in certain brands of stories which nobody believed in, and occasionally they were allowed to have a bit of business on the stage. Witless witlings had sneered at their claims to recognition, and writers of many minds, however they differed on other points, were generally united in the effort to keep the dead, one and all, from rising. Authors of romances found death a convenience in disposing of inconvenient characters of their own creation. When they could not manage them effectively any other way, they slaughtered them remorsely, and that was the end of them; that put them out of both writers’ and readers’ way for all time. Not even the good always escaped this doom. If readers could be entertainingly harrowed and wrought upon by the demise of the most angelic heroine, she had to die, and that finished her for friends and foes. At the grave everything ended. There love laid its treasures and turned hopelessly away; and there hate sheathed its poniard in satisfaction, having reached its extreme limit. Now Cartice Doring saw clearly that there are no finalities here; that the grave is not the end; that it never imprisoned a human soul. She saw that a new literature must come forth to satisfy minds of larger growth, which look upon death, not as a finality, but a change of costume and the opening of a new act. And this literature must go to the point, straight and clear; it must seek the solution of life’s problem and not merely amuse and beguile travelers on the journey.