Life is always a romance. There is fire in its heart, even in the three cold chambers of the toad’s heart; and the light of the fire flickers fainter than the guttered candle before it will go out. This may not be “the true light”; yet it lighteth every man that cometh into the world, every man with a pen, and his brother with a hoe, though they comprehend it not. One of our poets has written of “The Man With The Hoe” and left the man out and put only the hoe in the poem. This poet has written more than he has hoed, I am sure; as the painter of “The Man with the Hoe” had painted more than he had hoed, I am sure. Here is a poet who sees no light at all in “The Man with the Hoe,” because that poet has written more than he has hoed, which is to gather where he has not strawed. When a hoe looks as black as this to a pen, you will search the premises of the pen in vain for hoes. I hoe; I know men who hoe; and none of us knows Mr. Markham’s scarecrow for ourself. Here a realist sees what another realist thought he saw; as if you could ever _see_ life! Life is not what the realist sees, but what the realist is and knows, plus what the man with the hoe is and knows; and he knows that, if chained to a pick instead of a hoe, down in the black pit of some Siberian mine, he could not work life out in the utter dark. Realism, if not a distortion and a disease, is at best only a half-truth; and the realist, if more than a medical examiner for his district, is but the undertaker besides. Whoever sings a true song, or pens the humblest plodding prose, whether of Achilles, son of Peleus, or of John Gilley, a milkman down in Maine, or of the toad, or of the bee, has essentially one story to tell, and must be a Homer, truly to tell it. Here on my desk lies the story of John Gilley, and over in the next farmhouse lingers the unwritten story of another milkman, my neighbor, Joel Moore; and in the other neighbor-houses live like people--humble, humdrum country people, with their stories, which, if lighted with nothing but their own hovering gleam, would glow forever. The next man I meet would make a book; for either he is, or he knows, a good-enough story, could I but come by the tale. O. Henry, pacing the streets in an agony of fear at having run out of story-matter, is only a case of nerves. The one inexhaustible supply of matter in the Universe that is of use to man is story-matter; for, as the first human pair have been a perpetual song and story, so the last pair shall be the theme for some recording angel, or else they will leave a diary. The real ill with literature is writer’s cramp, an inability to seize the story, all of it, its truth as well as its facts--an ill, not of too much observation, but of too little imagination. Art does not watch life and record it. Art loves life and creates it.