any one lives, why should we call him to account? He cannot but teach
what he has, what has been given him, and we have but ourselves to thank
that, as every radiant June comes round, diplomas for ennui are being
handed out--thousands of them--to specially favoured children through
all this broad and glorious land.

The Fifth Interference: The Habit of Analysis

I

If Shakespeare Came to Chicago

It is one of the supreme literary excellences of the Bible that, until
the other day almost, it had never occurred to any one that it is
literature at all. It has been read by men and women, and children and
priests and popes, and kings and slaves and the dying of all ages, and
it has come to them not as a book, but as if it were something happening
to them.

It has come to them as nights and mornings come, and sleep and death, as
one of the great, simple, infinite experiences of human life. It has
been the habit of the world to take the greatest works of art, like the
greatest works of God, in this simple and straightforward fashion, as
great experiences. If a masterpiece really is a masterpiece, and rains
and shines its instincts on us as masterpieces should, we do not think
whether it is literary or not, any more than we gaze on mountains and
stop to think how sublimely scientific, raptly geological, and logically
chemical they are. These things are true about mountains, and have their
place. But it is the nature of a mountain to insist upon its own
place--to be an experience first and to be as scientific and geological
and chemical as it pleases afterward. It is the nature of anything
powerful to be an experience first and to appeal to experience. When we
have time, or when the experience is over, a mountain or a masterpiece
can be analysed--the worst part of it; but we cannot make a masterpiece
by analysing it; and a mountain has never been appreciated by pounding
it into trap, quartz, and conglomerate; and it still holds good, as a
general principle, that making a man appreciate a mountain by pounding
it takes nearly as long as making the mountain, and is not nearly so
worth while.

Not many years ago, in one of our journals of the more literary sort,
there appeared a few directions from Chicago University to the late John
Keats on how to write an "Ode to a Nightingale." These directions were
from the Head of a Department, who, in a previous paper in the same
journal, had rewritten the "Ode to a Grecian U