constituted in the universal belief, that the time, with eternity in
its train, would have returned for fitly hailing it in the apostrophe of
the Addisonian Cato:

"But thou shalt flourish in immortal youth,
Unhurt amidst the war of elements,
The wreck of matter, and the crush of worlds."

VII

THE RENEWAL OF INSPIRATION

There comes a time in the experience of perhaps every stated purveyor of
intellectual food when the stock he has long been drawing upon seems
finally exhausted. There is not a grain left in the barns where he had
garnered up the harvests of the past; there is not a head of wheat to be
found in the fields where he had always been able to glean something; if
he shakes the tree of knowledge in the hope of a nut to crack or a
frozen-thaw to munch, nothing comes down but a shower of withered
leaves. His condition is what, in the parlance of his vocation, he calls
being out of a subject, and it is what may happen to him equally whether
he is preaching twice a Sunday from the pulpit, or writing leaders every
day for a prominent journal, or merely contributing a monthly essay to a
magazine. As the day or hour or moment approaches when he must give
forth something from his destitution, he envies the hungriest of his
auditors or readers who do not yet know that there is nothing in him to
appease their famine. There is only the barren will to give which only a
miracle can transform into a vitalizing bounty.

Yet is not this miracle always wrought? When did a pulpit ever fail of a
sermon, or a journal of a leading article, or a magazine of its stated
essay? The fact might argue the very contrary of the appearance and
convince the desperate purveyor that what he mistook for hopeless need
was choice which mocked him with a myriad alternatives. From cover to
cover the Scripture is full of texts; every day brings forth its
increase of incident; the moral and social and aesthetical world is open
on every side to polite inquiry and teems with inspiring suggestion. If
ever the preacher or editor or essayist fancies he has exhausted these
resources, he may well pause and ask whether it is not himself that he
has exhausted. There may be wanting the eye to see the riches which lie
near or far, rather than the riches which are always inviting the eye.

A curious trait of the psychology of this matter is that it is oftener
the young eye than the old which lacks the visual force. When Eugenio
was beginn