Says one of the greatest of modern philosophers: “If anything in the world is worth wishing for--so well worth wishing for that even the ignorant and dull herd in its more reflective moments would prize it more than silver or gold--it is that a ray of light should fall on the obscurity of our being, and that we should gain some explanation of our mysterious existence, in which nothing is clear but its misery and its vanity.” To each of us things are what they appear from each particular point of view. Our idea is our limitation. He who writes a book presents to other minds a picture of life as it appears to him, from whatever point of view he has chosen. His work portrays both that which he sees outside himself and that which is within. It is a combination of himself and the world as he sees it, for of subject and object are all things made. When we read a tale it is the author we learn to know, rather than his people; but we know him through his people. They are the dwellers within his mind, and we cannot know them without entering that realm and knowing it, be it enchanted or disenchanting. Sight and insight make up all literature. Every book is a combination of the author and what he looks upon and studies objectively as well as subjectively. It is truth as he sees it. I have read many interesting works of fiction; but for the most part I laid them down dissatisfied. They lacked something for which I was always searching. They gave no answer to the questions that early began to trouble me--questions that nobody could answer and few cared to be bothered with. Often they were very attractive pictures of that which the world is to so many--a fool’s paradise. They dealt with the emotions of those whose lives they portrayed, and they appealed to the emotions of those who read them; and all had ever the one, one theme--the pursuit of happiness. And all pursuers saw the alluring phantom in the same shape, and gave chase to it by the same road. Sometimes they captured it, and then--the book ended. There was nothing else for the author to do when he reached that point, but to let the curtain drop and turn out the lights, lest his audience see that the happiness so hotly pursued was not the true thing after all; but only an appearance, an illusion, a disappointment, as veritable a phantom as ever--which left the one in possession of it no better off than he was before he captured it. Now the form of this phantom, was the love of the man and the woman for each other, and the possession of each by the other. Romances have been mostly amplified sex chases. They wrought upon the reader’s emotions through many harrowing chapters, the end thereof being that a certain man married the particular woman he was pursuing.