the saddest that
ear ever heard. It was a wind that might have swept the fields
of mortality for a thousand centuries. Many times since upon
summer days, when the sun is about the hottest, I have
remarked the same wind arising and uttering the same hollow,
solemn, Memnonian, but saintly swell; it is in this world the
one great audible symbol of eternity.

It is a great temptation to quote some of De Quincey's fine passages,
but most of them are so interwoven with the context that the most
eloquent bits cannot be taken out without the loss of their beauty. De
Quincey was a dreamer before he became a slave to opium. This drug
intensified a natural tendency until he became a visionary without an
equal in English literature. And these visions, evoked by his splendid
imagination, are worth reading in these days as an antidote to the
materialism of present-day life; they demonstrate the power of the
spiritual life, which is the potent and abiding force in all
literature.

CHARLES LAMB AND THE ESSAYS OF ELIA

THE BEST BELOVED OF ALL THE ENGLISH WRITERS--QUAINTEST AND
TENDEREST ESSAYIST WHOSE WORK APPEALS TO ALL HEARTS.

Of all the English writers of the last century none is so well beloved
as Charles Lamb. Thirty years ago his _Essays of Elia_ was a book
which every one with any claim to culture had not only read, but read
many times. It was the traveling companion and the familiar friend,
the unfailing resource in periods of depression, the comforter in time
of trouble. It touched many experiences of life, and it ranged from
sunny, spontaneous humor to that pathos which is too deep for tears.
Into it Lamb put all that was rarest and best in his nature, all that
he had gleaned from a life of self-sacrifice and spiritual culture.

[Illustration: CHARLES LAMB FROM THE PORTRAIT BY WILLIAM
HAZLITT]

Such men as he were rare in his day, and not understood by the
literary men of harder nature who criticised his peculiarities and
failed to appreciate the delicacy of his genius. Only one such has
appeared in our time--he who has given us a look into his heart in _A
Window in Thrums_ and in that beautiful tribute to his mother,
_Margaret Ogilvie_. Barrie, in his insight into the mind of a child
and in his freakish fancy that seems brought over from the world of
fairyland to lend its glamour to prosaic life, is the only successor
to Lamb.

Lamb can endure this neglect, for were he ab