To be old and to know ten thousand things--there is something august and majestic in the thought; but to be young and ignorant, to see yesterday pass, a shining ripple on the flood of oblivion, and then to buckle down to the day’s business,--there’s a better thing than being old and wise! We are forever praising the unconscious ease of great literature; and that ease--typical of the life and time reflected--was a thing of the day, with no yesterdays’ dead weight dragging it down. Whitman’s charm for those of us who like him lies in the fact that he doesn’t invite us to a rummage sale of cast-off raiment, but offers fabrics that are fresh and in new patterns. We have all known that same impatience of the past that he voices so stridently. The world is as new to him as it was to Isaiah or Homer. “When I heard the learned astronomer, When the proofs and figures were ranged in columns before me, When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them; When I, sitting, heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture room, How soon, unaccountably, I became tired and sick, Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself, In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.” The old doctor can name all the stars without a telescope, but he does not know that in joy they “perform their shining.” The real note in life is experiment and quest, and we are detached far more than we realize from what was and concerned with what is and may be. There is a delightful comedy,--long popular in England and known in America, in which a Martian appears on earth to teach Dickens-like lessons of unselfishness to men. Since witnessing it, I have often indulged in speculations as to the sensations of a pilgrim who might wing his way from another star to this earth, losing in the transition all knowledge of his own past--and come freshly upon our world and its achievements, beholding man at his best and worst without any knowledge whatever of our history or of the evolution through which we have become what we are. There you would have a critic who could view our world with fresh eyes. What we were yesterday would mean nothing to him, and what we are to-day he might judge honestly from a standpoint of utility or beauty. Not what was old or new, but what was good, would interest him--not whether our morals are better than those of our ancestors, but whether they are of any use at all. The croaking plaint of Not-What-It-Used-To-Be, the sanguine It-Will-Come-In-Time, would have no meaning for such a judge. “And not only so, but we glory in tribulations also; knowing that tribulation worketh patience; and patience, experience; and experience, hope.”