"Whether we regard life as a lane leading to a dead wall--a mere bag's end, as the French say--or whether we think of it as a vestibule or gymnasium where we wait our turn and prepare our faculties for some nobler destiny ... whether we look justly for years of health and vigour, or are about to mount into a bath chair as a step towards the hearse,--in each and all of these situations there is but one conclusion possible; that a man should stop his ears to paralyzing terror, and run the race that is set before him with a single mind." In that Sermon is all the philosophy of Greece, the stern courage of Rome. December 23. "Philistia, be Thou Glad of Me." Strange things rise up to us out of the deeps. Because I am a heathen, and Apollo is my god rather than any other, I have never been quite able to comprehend the powerful appeal the Hebrew Messiah makes to the hearts of so many. The solution is to be found in this "De Profundis"--Oscar Wilde's posthumous volume. It is a beautiful book: likely to become a classic of our language by reason of its beautiful, limpid English, its amazing exposition of the course of reasoning by which an outcast of humanity reaches peace and reconciliation with his own soul. The man's crime, I think, was the result of his reluctance to relinquish youth, with its passions and stimulations of the senses. We all find its relinquishment a tragedy. Some of us refuse to accept the slow, cold enveloping of that cruel serpent of Time, which squeezes out of us our beauty, our vigour, our warmth, and leaves us pallid and eviscerated before devouring us entirely. Wilde, whose whole existence was the pursuit of passion and beauty, violently resenting the fact that with the lapse of years he was no longer able to wake the old thrill of existence by any of the old methods--finding that poetry, art, and the beauty of women all left him more and more jaded and cold, he grasped at vice as a means of heat, and brought himself within the iron clutch of the law. One can guess, even without the aid of his own confessions, at the hysterical rage of this sybaritic dandy caught in the grim trap of the reprobation of Society. Not only the physical discomforts and restraints bore heavily, but more intolerable was the contempt and disgust of the average man--the Philistine--to whom he had always held himself airily and scornfully superior. The old primal laws of the struggle for life lie too deep for even the boldest of us to lightly face universal condemnation. The worst of rebels and cynics is so dependent upon the countenance of his fellows that when good-will is withdrawn a sort of madness of despair falls upon him, and this vain, sensitive poet makes it plain how the passionate protest of the ordinary criminal was in his case intensified to ecstasy. One sees the poor creature, like a rat in a cage, darting hither and thither, and shivering with sick and furious helplessness at the rigidity of the