o be a
sorrowful view of life that, to have very little faith or prospect
about it. It is true indeed that the paradox-maker is popular now; but
that is because men are interested in interpretations of life; and it
is true too that we are a little impatient now of fancy and
imagination, and want to get at facts, because we feel that fancy and
imagination, which are not built on facts, are very tricksy guides to
life. But the view seems to me both depressed and morbid which cannot
look beyond, and see that the world is passing on in its own great
unflinching, steady manner. It is like the view of a child who,
confronted with a pain, a disagreeable incident, a tedious day of
drudgery, wails that it can never be happy again.

The poem ends with a fine apostrophe to Browning as one "who stormed
through death, and laid hold of Eternity." Did he indeed do that? I
wish I felt it! He had, of course, an unconquerable optimism, which
argued promise from failure and perfection from incompleteness. But I
cannot take such hopes on the word of another, however gallant and
noble he may be. I do not want hopes which are only within the reach
of the vivid and high-hearted; the crippled, drudging slave cannot
rejoice because he sees his warrior-lord gay, heroic, and strong. I
must build my creed on my own hopes and possibilities, not on the
strength and cheerfulness of another.

And then my eye fell on a sentence opposite, out of an article on our
social problems; and this was what I read:

"... the tears of a hunger-bitten philosophy, which is so
appalled by the common doom of man--that he must eat his
bread by the sweat of his brow--that it can talk, write, and
think of nothing else."

I think there is more promise in that, rough and even rude as the
statement is, because it opens up a real hope for something that is
coming, and is not a mere lamentation over a star that is set.

"A hunger-bitten philosophy"--is it not rather that there is creeping
into the world an uneasy sense that we must, if we are to be happy,
_share_ our happiness? It is not that the philosopher is hungry, it is
that he cannot bear to think of all the other people who are condemned
to hunger; and why it occupies his tongue and his pen, is that it
clouds his serenity to know that others cannot now be serene. All this
unrest, this grasping at the comfort of life on the one hand, and the
patience, the justice, the tolerance, with which such