It is the height of literary skill to gather up your thought into a single word and fling it flaming on canvas. It is more convincing than a long chapter of dull argument which drugs the senses. Tennyson knew the magic of a single epithet in the thought scheme of the moment when he sang: "All the charm of all the muses often flowering in a lonely word." It is not as easily done as eating hot cakes for tea, for it is not the first word that comes sailing into a man’s head that is the right word. "The comely phrase, the well-born word," is a prince of high degree, and you may wait in his anteroom days before an audience is granted. The elect word does not sit on the tip of the tongue and drop into its place at call. You may search diligently and not find it, and presently of its own free will it comes to you, a happy thought flashed from the void where whispering spirits dwell. Gray’s Elegy is the most perfect poem in the English language. It was not thrown together carelessly in an idle hour one sleepy summer afternoon. Every word and every line of it cost thought, was written and rewritten, and patiently polished over again. For eight years the author held the poem between the hammer and the anvil, beating it into shape before he passed it into print. He damaged reams of paper developing a fair copy of those immortal verses. *V* *THE LURE OF AN OLD TUSCAN GARDEN* A delightful French writer says "to grow old in a garden in sight of softly undulating hills, beneath a sky variable as the human soul, is very sweet, very consoling, very easy. One becomes more of a child and for the first time a philosopher. Poetry and wisdom on every hand permeate the close of life, just as the oblique rays of the setting sun penetrate into the heart of the densest foliage, which is impervious to the vertical beams of noonday." This charming writer touches the spot; experience, tenderness, and sympathy flow from mellowed lips well rounding to the autumn of life. Old age does reflect more discerningly than impatient youth, and in a garden, too, surrounded by a heavenly host of flowers whose blossom is as laughter and whose perfume is a song. Romance sketches wonderful pictures with such a beatific background to inspire it, and imagination wanders into a carnival of dreams. How many pleasant thoughts and noble thoughts have been brought to birth in a garden which afterward grew into brave deeds and gentle lives contributing generously to enrich the sum of human happiness!