LITERATURE.
A great deal of very good writing has been done by invalids, but it is not likely that anybody [p 190] />]ever produced a line worth remembering while suffering with a plain cold.
We were saying to our friend Dr. Empedocles that we kept our enthusiasms green by never taking anything very seriously. “That’s interesting,” said he: “I, too, have kept my enthusiasm fresh, and I have always taken everything seriously.” The two notions seemed irreconcilable, but we presently agreed that by having a great number and variety of enthusiasms one is not likely to ride any of them to death. We all know persons who wear out an enthusiasm by taking it as solemnly as they would a religious rite.
We were sure that the headline, “Mint at Chicago Greatly Needed, Houston Says,” would inspire more than one reader to remark that the mint is the least important part of the combination.
We are reminded of the experience of a friend who has a summer place in Connecticut. At church the pastor announced a fund for some war charity, and asked for contributions. Our friend sent in fifty dollars, and a few days later inquired of the pastor how much money had been raised, “Fifty-five dollars and seventy-five cents,” was [p 191] />]the answer. The pastor had contributed five dollars.
SONG.
[In the manner of Laura Blackburn.]
I quested Love with timid feet,
And many qualms and perturbations—
Hoping yet fearing we should meet,
Because I knew my limitations.
When Love I spied I fetched a sigh—
A sigh a Tristan might expire on:
“I must apologize,” said I,
“For not resembling Georgie Byron.”
Love laughed and said, “You know I’m blind,”
And pinched my ear, the little cutie!
“Her heart and yours shall be entwined,
Tho’ you were twice as shy on beauty.”
Throwing self-interest to the winds, a Chicago sweetshop advertises: “That we may have a part in the effort to bring back normal conditions and reduce the high cost of living, our prices on chocolates and bon-bons are now one dollar and fifty cents per pound.”
Persons who are so o. f. as to like rhyme with their poetry may discover another reason for [p 192] />]their preference in the following passage, which Edith Wyatt quotes from Oscar Wilde:
“Rime, that exquisite echo which in the Muse’s hollow hill creates and answers its own voice; rime, which in the hands of the real artist becomes not merely a material element of material beauty, but a spiritual element of thought and passion also, waking a new mood, it may be, or stirring a fresh train of ideas, or opening by mere sweetness and suggestion of sound some golden door at which the Imagination itself had knocked in vain; rime which can turn man’s utterance to the speech of gods”—
We promised Miss Wyatt that the next time we happened on the parody of Housman’s “Lad,” we would reprint it; and yesterday we stumbled on it. Voila!—