Here the profound lesson of reception, neither preference nor denial; The black and his woolly head, the felon, the diseased, the illiterate person, are not denied; The birth, the hasting after the physician; the beggar's tramp, the drunkard's stagger, the laughing party of mechanics, The escaped youth, the rich person's carriage, the fop, the eloping couple, The early marketman, the hearse, the moving of furniture into town, the return back from town, They pass--I also pass--anything passes--none may be interdicted; None but are accepted--none but are dear to me. _Mon enfant!_ I give you my hand! I give you my love more precious than money; I give you myself before preaching or law; Will you give me yourself? Will you come travel with me? Shall we stick by each other as long as we live? Beside this, doesn't the _Menelaus and Helen_ seem like an orchid?--a very beautiful, rich orchid, to be sure, but not of the Whitman family. GEORGE SOULE. More About the "New Note" The idea of "the new note" might be worked out more fully, but after all little or nothing would be gained by elaboration. Given this note of craft love all the rest must follow, as the spirit of self-revelation, which is also a part of the new note, will follow any true present-day love of craft. You will remember we once discussed Coningsby Dawson's _The Garden Without Walls_. What I quarreled with in that book was that the writer looked outside of himself for his material. Even realists have done this--as, for example, Howells; and to that extent have failed. The master Zola failed here. Why do we so prize the work of Whitman, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Twain, and Fielding? Is it not because as we read we are constantly saying to ourselves, "This book is true. A man of flesh and blood like myself has lived the substance of it. In the love of his craft he has done the most difficult of all things: revealed the workings of his own soul and mind"? To get near to the social advance for which all moderns hunger, is it not necessary to have first of all understanding? How can I love my neighbor if I do not understand him? And it is just in the wider diffusion of this understanding that the work of a great writer helps the advance of mankind. I would like to have you think much of this in your attitude toward all present-day writers. It is so easy for them to bluff us from our position, and I know from my own experience how baffling it is constantly to be coming upon good, well-done work that is false.