If THE PHILISTINE disturbs placid self-complacency anywhere, as one or two of its critics intimate, it is sorry, for there is no such happiness attainable anywhere this side of Nirvana as its serene contemplation of the charms of self which Narcissus and some more modern fakirs exemplify; and the magazine of to-day is its gospel. But so good a Philistine as Horace Greeley is my authority for believing that the still pool in which self-love sees the reflection it feeds upon is a breeder of death, not life, and effervescence is the sworn foe of the morbid. Not the things we do that we ought not to do, but the things left undone that we ought to do are the primary count leading up to the confession that “there is no health in us.” The other follows. Stagnation and the miasma of self-consciousness co-exist and are not to be separated. Wherefore, fellow-egoists, let us get a gait on. * * * * * I like the broad flourish with which some imaginative writers connect widely separated events in a stroke of the pen and omit all that lies between as mere incident. It seems to me a proof of the theory put forward by my good friend Elbert Hubbard that genius is a feminine element of character—in man or woman. For example, I find this statement in the latest of the _Little Journeys_: “Moses was sent adrift, but the tide carried him into power.” I didn’t know just what that meant till I recalled the discovery of the bulrush cradle. A less intuitive writer wouldn’t have bridged eighty years in that summary way. He might have hinted at Moses’s police court record—told how he killed an Egyptian for calling him a son of a Populist or something and skun out for half a lifetime and yet became a Prince of Egypt and spent forty years or so at court before he took the road with the forefathers of Brickmaker Tourgee. But to connect the condensed milk baby in the market basket on the Nile with the law-giver of Israel in one movement, as the music people say, is a pretty long span and suggests the liberty David Copperfield takes with his own biography in the best book but one written by the subject of the latest _Little Journey_. “I was born:” he says—and all else is irrelevant. I take it that Mr. Hubbard agrees with John Boyle O’Reilly that “the world was made when a man was born.” The feminine element of genius which Mr. Hubbard tells us makes poets is manifest in that formula. If the author of the _Journeys_ will permit, I would suggest that the same mother instinct that crops out there is manifested in the grasp of a life in the compass of a sentence which puzzled me at the first. To be born and to die is the record of existence, to which all else is tributary; and the pangs of birth and death thrill all the poet-strains. Only the tragedy that sweeps along the strings lives to echo in human hearts. It is the deathless minor chord that distinguishes the melody of true poetry from the dancing cadences of rhyme in all literature.