own doctors and saviors, and go back only for lovers and for the touch of nature that makes all the world kin? I know not; yet it is apparent that he who stands upon the common ground where all men stand, and by the magic of his genius makes poetry and romance out of that, has the best chance to endure. Only so far as the writers named, or any writers, represent states of mind and spirit that are likely to return again and again, and not to be outgrown in the progress of the race, are we likely to come back to them, or is the future likely to feel an interest in them. A path or a road becomes obsolete when there are no more travelers going that way; and an author becomes obsolete when there are no more readers going _his_ way. For my part, I find myself returning again and again to the works of the men named, but, of course, with the cooled ardor that years bring to every man. I feel that I am less near the end with Whitman than with any of the others; he is the most stimulating to my intellect, because he suggests the most far-reaching problems. I re-read Wordsworth as I walk again along familiar paths that lead to the sequestered and the idyllic. I climb the Whitman mountain when I want a big view, and a wide horizon, and a glimpse of the unknown. I think the service most of us get from Carlyle is a moral rather than an intellectual one. He was to his generation more like a much-needed drastic tonic remedy than like a simple hygienic regimen; we get the virtue of him now in a thousand ways without re-reading him. Hence there are more chances of our outgrowing him than of our outgrowing some lesser but more normal men. In a measure, I think, this is true of Emerson, but not entirely so. Emerson has charm; he has illusion; he has the witchery of the ideal. He is like the wise doctor whose presence, whose reassuring smile, and whose cheerful prognosis do more for the patient than anything else. We want him to come again and again. To re-read his first essays, his “Representative Men,” his “English Traits,” and many of his poems, is again to hear music, to breathe perfume, or to walk in a spring twilight when the evening star throbs above the hill.