the unforeseen, cannot but
prefigure itself as a theme for meditation to the worker who looks back
on a day, a week, a month, an entire season, in which "the flighty
purpose" has never been overtaken. The calendar has the inexorableness
of fate. The day, the month, goes by, unrelenting. It may be shattered
with feeble and inexpressive demands, but all the same it is gone, and
it is unreturning. Whether freighted richly with the essential, or
merely burdened with the ineffectual, it is equally irretrievable.

This involves a problem of life full of spiritual perplexity. Certainly,
no man liveth to himself, or, if he does, his living is a selfish and
worthless thing. Certainly a man _is_ his brother's keeper--to a degree.
The poet whose dream is about to crystallize in verse is assured that
life is more than art, and that to sustain the spirits of the depressed
caller who appears at that precise instant, with the unfailing instinct
with which the depressed do invariably appear at a literary crisis,--he
is assured that this act is a "nobler poem" than any he could write. And
such is the tremendous impression that the gospel in the air of the
service of humanity makes on us all, that he dare not disregard this
possibility. He is not absolutely sure, it is true, that he is "serving
humanity" in this individual instance, but he is not at all sure that it
is _not_ true; and he reflects that other days are coming, when,
perhaps, by some divine dispensation, the depressed caller will _not_
appear! But there are no days on which he, or his prototype, is not on
hand, and so the problem ever remains a present, an immediate, and,
alas! an insoluble one. For this is an age when the depressed, who have
nothing to do, require, to sustain their drooping spirits, the
sympathetic ministrations of those who are too busy to indulge in the
languid luxury of gentle and romantic sadness. In fact, they feel a
certain inalienable right to demand that current of sympathetic interest
which otherwise would express itself in the specific work in which one
is engaged. "You desire to 'serve humanity,' do you?" the depressed
caller says, virtually, as he fixes the mere worker with his glittering
eye. "Well, I am Humanity. What is a book compared to a human soul?
Here, before you, in living personality, is a need. Can you forsake it
for abstract literature?"

If the unfortunate worker has any species of the New England conscience
he is at a disadvanta