The other night I heard Schumann's Des Abends--that summer-night elegy of a thousand, thousand cadences--played near a place where trees were stirring softly and grass smelling warm and cool; some one said afterward that it was pretty.... The other day I heard a violin played so throbbingly that it was like "what the sea has striven to say"; and through it all a group of people talked, as though no miracle were happening. Not very long after these two ---- (I can't find a noun), I talked with some one who tried to convince me that the biggest and most valiant person I know was--"well, not the sort one can afford to be friends with." Somehow all three episodes immediately linked themselves together in my mind. Each was a failure of the same type--a failure of imagination, of feeling; the last one, at least, was tragedy; and it will become impossible for people to fail that way only when they stop failing in the first two ways. Not long ago I went into a music store and bought Tschaikowsky's Les Larmes. It cost twenty-eight cents. I walked out so under the spell of the immense adventure of living that I realized later how imbecile I must have looked and why the clerk gazed at me so suspiciously. But I had a song which had cost a man who knows what sorrow to write--a thing of such richness that it meant experience to any one who could own it. One of the world's big things for twenty-eight cents! And such things happen every day! Sex is simply the quintessence of this type of feeling, plus a deeper thing for which no words have been made. But we reach the wonder of the utmost realization in just one way: by having felt greatly at every step. "American artists know everything," said a young foreign sculptor lately; "they know that much" (throwing out his arms wide), "but they only feel that much!" (measuring an inch with his fingers). How can we produce the great audiences that Whitman knew we needed in order to have great poets, if we don't train the new generations to feel? How can we prevent these crimes against love and sex--how put a stop to human waste in all its hideous forms--if we don't recognize the new idealism which means not to deny? A Kaleidoscope NICHOLAS VACHEL LINDSAY Blanche Sweet--Moving-Picture Actress [After seeing the reel called Oil and Water.] Beauty has a throne-room In our humorous town, Spoiling its hobgoblins, Laughing shadows down. Dour musicians torture Rag-time ballads vile, But we walk serenely Down the odorous aisle. We forgive the squalor, And the boom and squeal, For the Great Queen flashes From the moving reel.