r leaves removed? "Sesame and Lilies" had the
effect of sending me back to the single violet whenever I was inclined
to admire the _camellia japonica_ or any other thing that was
artificial, or distorted from beauty or simplicity.

Circumstances have a great deal to do with our affection for books.
Propinquity, they say, leads very frequently to marriage, and if a book
happens to be near and if it is any kind of book at all, there is a
great temptation to develop an affection for it. All I can say is that I
think that "Sesame and Lilies" is a good book, for after all a book must
be judged by its effect. It led me further into Ruskin, and helped me to
acquire a reverence for art and to estimate the relations of art and
life. One would steel oneself against the fallacy that art, true art,
might exist only for art's sake, when one had read "Sesame and Lilies"
and "The Stones of Venice." Those wise men who make literary
"selections" for the young have done well to include in their volumes
that graphic description, so carefully modulated in tone, of the
Cathedral of St. Mark. Its only fault is that it comes too near to being
prose poetry; and discriminating readers who ponder over it will find
some epithets possible only to a writer who was an artist in lines and
pigments before he began to paint with the pen.

Ruskin opened our eyes rather violently to some aspects of life which
we, the young, did not know; for the young after all learn very little
by intuition. They must be taught things. This is perhaps an excuse for
those vagaries in youth, those seemingly inexplicable adventures which
shock the old who have forgotten what it is to be young.

CHAPTER II

POETS AND POETRY

_France--Of Maurice de Gu['e]rin_

In 1872, the attention of readers was forced on a few great names. These
were generally the names of Frenchmen. The sympathy of Americans during
the Franco-Prussian War had been with France, and during the latter days
of the French Empire, before the war, Americans had been much more
interested in France than in any other part of the world. There were
letters from Paris in the newspapers. The Empress Eug['e]nie and her
coterie at the Tuileries, the Operas of Offenbach, and the gossip about
literary magnets of the time, which included a great deal of Victor
Hugo, had been a constant subject of conversations.

One could buy French books easily in Philadelphia; and the Mercantile
Library--now dreadfully sh