s new whether
he breaks new ground or not, or he is newly welcome. With his own
generation, with the readers who began young with him and have grown old
with him, he is always safe. But there is danger for him with the
readers who begin young with him after he has grown old. It is they who
find his tales twice told and himself hackneyed, unless they have been
trained to like his personal quality by their elders. This might be
difficult, but it is not impossible, and ought not it to be the glad,
the grateful care of such elders?

VI

THE FICKLENESS OF AGE

All forms of literature probably hold a great deal more meaning than
people commonly get out of them; but prose may be likened to a cup which
one can easily see to the bottom of, though it is often deeper and
fuller than it looks; while verse is the fount through which thought and
feeling continually bubble from the heart of things. The sources that
underlie all life may be finding vent in a rhyme where the poet imagined
he was breathing some little, superficial vein of his own; but in the
reader he may unawares have reached the wells of inmost passion and
given them release. The reader may himself live with a certain verse and
be aware of it now and then merely as a teasing iterance that

"From some odd corner of the mind
Beats time to nothing in the brain."

But suddenly some experience, or perhaps the exfoliation of the outer
self through the falling away of the withered years, shall open to him
its vital and cosmical significance. He shall know then that it is not
an idle whisper of song, but a message to his soul from the senate where
the immortals gather in secular counsel and muse the wisdom of all the
centuries since humanity came to its earliest consciousness. The bearer
of the message may not have known it in the translation which it wears
to the receiver; each must read it in his own tongue and read meaning
into it; perhaps it always takes two to make a poet, and singer and
listener are the twin spheres that form one star.

A valued correspondent of ours, one of those whose letters are oftener
than we should like to own fraught with the suggestion of our most
fortunate inspirations, believes himself to have been recently the
confidant of the inner sense of certain lines in a familiar poem of
Longfellow's. Its refrain had, from the first reading, chanted in the
outer chamber of his ear, but suddenly, the other day, it sang to his
soul wi