"In their ignorance of human nature and natural law idealists have dreamed and created the most unattainable Utopias, and their impossible visions shaped our destiny and made us great. The stirring speech that Lametkin delivered this evening is partly due to his ignorance of things and his blind faith in his panacea, but it enthused his audience immensely, and it will have a wonderful effect upon their lives. The other day I read some beautiful lines by Owen Meredith about the child who cries 'to clutch the star that shines in splendor over his little cot.' The matter-of-fact father says that it is folly, that it is millions of miles away, and that 'the star descends not to twinkle on the little one's bed.' But the mother tenderly tells the child to sleep and promises to pluck the star for it and by-and-by '_Lay it upon the pillow bright with dew_,' and then the child sleeps and dreams of stars whose light '_Beams in his own bright eyes when he awakes_.' "Now in these lines one may find justification for all the idealizations of art, but they are also suggestive of the value of ignorance. So it is. We must learn to see the invisible. We must be oblivious to the obvious, to see anything. We ought not to try to clear up everything. If life were not a problem play it would not interest us so. Let the mystery remain. Intimations of immortality are good enough; proofs would kill our longing for it. Whence? Whither? I rather hope these questions will never be answered. The halo, the maze, the mystery, the shadowy strangeness of it all makes it worth while and gives the fancy freedom to fly. Statistics sterilize the imagination and figures dry up our souls. Do you remember Whitman's 'When I Heard the Learned Astronomers?' The lecturer with his charts and diagrams soon made him unaccountably sick, till rising and gliding out of the lecture room he wandered off by himself 'in the mystical, moist night-air, and from time to time looked up in perfect silence at the stars,' and thus became himself again.