ll-tale Heart. This prophet-wizard side of a man
otherwise a wizard only, has been well illustrated in The Avenging
Conscience photoplay.

From Maeterlinck we have The Bluebird and many another dream. I devoutly
hope I will never see in the films an attempt to paraphrase this master.
But some disciple of his should conquer the photoplay medium, giving us
great original works.

Yeats has bestowed upon us The Land of Heart's Desire, The Secret Rose,
and many another piece of imaginative glory. Let us hope that we may be
spared any attempts to hastily paraphrase his wonders for the motion
pictures. But the man that reads Yeats will be better prepared to do his
own work in the films, or to greet the young new masters when they come.

Finally, Francis Thompson, in The Hound of Heaven, has written a song
that the young wizard may lean upon forevermore for private guidance. It
is composed of equal parts of wonder and conscience. With this poem in
his heart, the roar of the elevated railroad will be no more in his ears,
and he will dream of palaces of righteousness, and lead other men to
dream of them till the houses of mammon fade away.

CHAPTER XXI

THE ACCEPTABLE YEAR OF THE LORD

Without airing my private theology I earnestly request the most sceptical
reader of this book to assume that miracles in a Biblical sense have
occurred. Let him take it for granted in the fashion of the strictly
aesthetic commentator who writes in sympathy with a Fra Angelico painting,
or as that great modernist, Paul Sabatier, does as he approaches the
problems of faith in the life of St. Francis. Let him also assume, for
the length of time that he is reading this chapter if no longer, that
miracles, in a Biblical sense, as vivid and as real to the body of the
Church, will again occur two thousand years in the future: events as
wonderful as those others, twenty centuries back. Let us anticipate that
many of these will be upon American soil. Particularly as sons and
daughters of a new country it is a spiritual necessity for us to look
forward to traditions, because we have so few from the past identified
with the six feet of black earth beneath us.

The functions of the prophet whereby he definitely painted future
sublimities have been too soon abolished in the minds of the wise. Mere
forecasting is left to the weather bureau so far as a great section of
the purely literary and cultured are concerned. The term prophet has
survived i