iling to find
neighbours for himself, makes his neighbours with his own hands. If a
woman is childless, she paints Madonnas. It is the inspiration, the
despair that rests over all life. If we cannot express ourselves in
things that are made, we make things, and if we cannot express ourselves
in the things we make, we turn to words, and if we cannot express
ourselves in words, we turn to other men's words.

The man who is satisfied with one life does not exist. The suicide does
not commit suicide because he is tired of life, but because he wants so
many more lives that he cannot have. The native of the tropics buys a
book to the North Pole. If we are poor, we grow rich on paper. We roll
in carriages through the highway of letters. If we are rich, we revel in
a printed poverty. We cry our hearts out over our starving
paper-children and hold our shivering, aching magazine hands over dying
coals in garrets we live in by subscription at three dollars a year. The
Bible is the book that has influenced men most in the world because it
has expressed them the most. The moment it ceases to be the most
expressive book, it will cease to be the most practical and effective
one in human life. There is more of us than we can live. The touch of
the infinite through which our spirits wandered is still upon us. The
world cries to the poet: "Give me a new word--a word--a word! I will
have a word!" It cries to the great man out of all its narrow places:
"Give me another life! I will have a new life!" and every hero the world
has known is worn threadbare with worship, because his life says for
other men what their lives have tried to say. Every masterful life calls
across the world a cry of liberty to pent-up dreams, to the ache of
faith in all of us, "Here thou art my brother--this is thy heart that I
have lived." A hero is immortalised because his life is every man's
larger self. So through the day-span of our years--a tale that is never
told--we wander on, the infinite heart of each of us prisoned in blood
and flesh and the cry of us everywhere, throughout all being, "Give me
room!" It cries to the composer, "Make a high wide place for me!" and on
the edge of the silence between life and words, to music we come at last
because it is the supreme confidante of the human heart, the
confessional, the world-priest between the actual self and the larger
self of all of us. With all the multiplying of arts and the piling up of
books that have com