hole wide world in flames,
Poets who sang their passion to the skies,
And lovers wild and wise:
Fought they and prayed for some poor flitting gleam
Was all they loved and worshipped but a dream?
Is Love a lie and fame indeed a breath?
And is there no sure thing in life--but death?

Ah! perhaps we shall find all such lost and lovely things when we come
at length to the Land of Last Year's Snow.

X

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF GOSSIP

According to the old Scandinavian fable of the cosmos, the whole world
is encircled in the coils of a vast serpent. The ancient name for it was
the Midgard serpent, and doubtless, for the old myth-maker, it had
another significance. Today, however, the symbol may still hold good of
a certain terrible and hideous reality.

Still, as of old, the world is encircled in the coils of a vast serpent;
and the name of the serpent is Gossip. Wherever man is, there may you
hear its sibilant whisper, and its foul spawn squirm and sting and
poison in nests of hidden noisomeness, myriad as the spores of
corruption in a putrefying carcass, varying in size from some
hydra-headed infamy endangering whole nations and even races with its
deadly breath, to the microscopic wrigglers that multiply, a million a
minute, in the covered cesspools of private life.

Printed history is so infested with this vermin, in the form of secret
memoirs, back-stairs diarists, and boudoir eavesdroppers, that it is
almost impossible to feel sure of the actual fact of any history
whatsoever. The fame of great personages may be literally compared to
the heroic figures in the well-known group of the Laocooen, battling in
vain with the strangling coils of the sea-serpent of Poseidon. We
scarcely know what to believe of the dead; and for the living, is it not
true, as Tennyson puts it, that "each man walks with his head in a cloud
of poisonous flies"?

What is this evil leaven that seems to have been mixed in with man's
clay at the very beginning, making one almost ready to believe in the
old Manichean heresy of a principle of evil operating through nature,
everywhere doing battle with the good? Even from the courts of heaven,
as we learn from the Book of Job, the gossip was not excluded; and how
eternally true to the methods of the gossip in all ages was Satan's way
of going to work in that immortal allegory! Let us recall the familiar
scene with a quoted verse or two