ithout a villain or a
pang; this community so refined that ice-cream soda-water is the utmost
offering it can make to the brute animal in man; this city simmering in
the tepid lakeside sun; this atrocious harmlessness of all things,--I
cannot abide with them. Let me take my chances again in the big outside
worldly wilderness with all its sins and sufferings. There are the
heights and depths, the precipices and the steep ideals, the gleams of
the awful and the infinite; and there is more hope and help a thousand
times than in this dead level and quintessence of every mediocrity."

Such was the sudden right-about-face performed for me by my lawless
fancy! There had been spread before me the realization--on a small,
sample scale of course--of all the ideals for which our civilization has
been striving: security, intelligence, humanity, and order; and here was
the instinctive hostile reaction, not of the natural man, but of a
so-called cultivated man upon such a Utopia. There seemed thus to be a
self-contradiction and paradox somewhere, which I, as a professor
drawing a full salary, was in duty bound to unravel and explain, if I
could.

So I meditated. And, first of all, I asked myself what the thing was
that was so lacking in this Sabbatical city, and the lack of which kept
one forever falling short of the higher sort of contentment. And I soon
recognized that it was the element that gives to the wicked outer world
all its moral style, expressiveness and picturesqueness,--the element of
precipitousness, so to call it, of strength and strenuousness, intensity
and danger.

What excites and interests the looker-on at life, what the romances and
the statues celebrate and the grim civic monuments remind us of, is the
everlasting battle of the powers of light with those of darkness; with
heroism, reduced to its bare chance, yet ever and anon snatching victory
from the jaws of death. But in this unspeakable Chautauqua there was no
potentiality of death in sight anywhere, and no point of the compass
visible from which danger might possibly appear. The ideal was so
completely victorious already that no sign of any previous battle
remained, the place just resting on its oars. But what our human
emotions seem to require is the sight of the struggle going on. The
moment the fruits are being merely eaten, things become ignoble. Sweat
and effort, human nature strained to its uttermost and on the rack, yet
getting through alive, and t