ich much is said to-day, is not due
to the decadence of man. It is not the effect of the nerve strain of
over-wrought generations born too late in the dusk of the ages. Its
nature is this--that uncritical and untrained men have come into a
heritage they have not earned. They will pay money to have their
feeble fancy tickled. The decadence of literature is the struggle of
mountebanks to catch the public eye. There is money in the literature
of decay, and those who work for money have "verily their reward." But
these performances are not the work of men. They have no relation to
literature, or art, or human life. These are not in decadence because
imitations are sold on street-corners or tossed into our laps on
railway trains. As well say that gold is in its decadence because
brass can be burnished to look like it; or that the sun is in his
dotage because we have filled our gardens with Chinese lanterns.

"No ray is dimmed, no atom worn,
My oldest force is good as new
And the fresh rose on yonder thorn
Gives back the bending heavens in dew."

Literature has never been paid for. It has never asked the gold nor
the plaudits of the multitude. Job, and Hamlet, and Faust, and Lear,
were never written to fill the pages of a Sunday newspaper. John
Milton and John Bunyan were not publishers' hacks; nor were John
Hampden, John Bright, or Samuel Adams under pay as walking-delegates of
reform.

No man was hired to find out that the world was round, or that the
valleys are worn down by water, or that the stars are suns. No man was
paid to burn at the stake or die on the cross that other men might be
free to live. The sane, strong, brave, heroic souls of all ages were
the men who, in the natural order of things, have lived above all
considerations of pay or glory. They have served not as slaves hoping
for reward, but as gods who would take no reward. Men could not reward
Shakespeare, or Darwin, or Newton, or Helmholtz for their services any
more than we could pay the Lord for the use of His sunshine. From the
same inexhaustible divine reservoir it all comes--the service of the
great man and the sunshine of God.

"Twice have I molded an image,
And thrice outstretched my hand;
Made one of day and one of night,
And one of the salt sea strand
One in a Judean manger,
And one by Avon's stream;
One over against the mouths of Nile,
And one in the Academe."

And in such image