... I was all ear, And took in strains that might create a soul Under the ribs of death. At the present time, when a great war has brought bereavement into so many homes, and when superstition is reaping its harvest among the sad and broken lives that are everywhere around us, how can rational men do better than recall as many minds as possible from the false teachers to the true, from the priests, who claim a knowledge which they do not possess, to the poets, in whom, as Shelley said, there is “the power of communicating and receiving intense and impassioned conceptions respecting man and nature”? And the testimony of the poets cannot be mistaken; their first word and their last word is Love. Whether it be Cowper, gazing on his mother’s portrait; or Burns, lamenting his Highland Mary; or Wordsworth, in his elegies for Lucy; or Shelley, in the raptures of his “Adonais”; or pessimists, such as Edgar Poe and James Thomson, to whom love was the “sole star of light in infinite black despair”--the lesson that we learn from them is the same. For death there is no solace but in love; it is to love’s name that the human heart must cling. Ah! let none other alien spell soe’er, But only the one Hope’s one name be there, Not less, nor more, but even that word alone! XVII THE TALISMAN Comprendre c’est Pardonner.--MADAME DE STAËL. Are we, then, a civilized people? Has the Man of to-day, still living by bloodshed, still striving to grow rich at the expense of his neighbour, still using torture in punishment, still seeking sport in destruction, still waging fratricidal wars, and, while making a hell on earth, claiming for himself an eternal heaven hereafter--has this selfish, predatory being arrived at a state of “civilization”? It may be said, perhaps, that as the ideal is always in advance of the actual, and it is easy to show that any present stage of society falls far short of what it might be and ought to be, the distinction between savagery and civilization is a matter of names. This, in one sense, is true; but it is also true that names are of great importance as reacting upon conduct, and that to use flattering titles as a veil for cruel practices gives permanence to evils that otherwise would not be permitted. Our present self-satisfaction in what we are pleased to call our civilization is a very serious obstacle to improvement. In this manner euphemism plays a great part in language; for just as the Greeks used gracious terms to denote malignant powers, and so, as they thought, to disarm their hostility, the modern mind seeks, consciously or unconsciously, to disguise iniquities by misnaming them. Thus a blind tribal hatred can be masked as “patriotism”; living idly on the work of others is termed “an independence”; vivisection cloaks itself as “research”; and the massacre of wild animals for man’s wanton amusement is dignified as “sport.” There is undoubtedly much virtue in names.