How great is your appetite for life? How great is your willingness to break the shell of your prison and liquidate your heart? What prevents you from throwing open your arms to the universe, accepting and welcoming the embrace? The embrace of humanity is a glorious thing! It is the nectar of the gods. Be one with the world, be not a pariah; be part of the great wave, be not a stagnant pool.
But one hears answers, "I can't," "I don't want to," "I'm apart and will not mingle." Why can't you? Why won't you? Why are you apart? Is it because you are old and mummified? Have you lost your vision, have you lost your heart, has the world beaten you back, and does life roll too fast a pace? Has your understanding become blunted? Are you a snob upon a pedestal of derision? Are your eyes blind to the colors, your ears deaf to the music, your voice bitter in your companions' hearing?
Ah, let there be a way out of the prison—there is a door that will lead you to your youth. Within a man there is always the spark that can be made to brighten and to break into living flame. There is no understanding so dense, no spirit so sordid that it cannot be stirred to awaken to that sympathy for man and nature that is the pass word to the Kingdom of Life.
"The Kingdom of Life." Those are perhaps hackneyed words, and yet how many of us seem to be the inheritors of the Kingdom of Death. Live bodies find no value in dead souls, so let us make our souls aflame and attain to a realization of life. Where is the match to strike the light, the key to open the door?
Through all the ages there has been a medium through which the hearts of men have been revealed. There has been one cauldron into which the riches of our richest and most godlike minds have been poured. It is the melting pot that has purified the sorrows and joys of men, since man had wit enough to know his pangs and jubilations. There is a vehicle which will bring us to a universal sympathy, if not an understanding, of our human kindred. There is a powerful tool, welded by man, with which we can awaken ourselves to an appreciation of our universe, from which we can obtain consolation in our difficulties, stimulus for our ambitions, tonic for our depressions. The medium, the cauldron, the vehicle, the tool is Literature.
Some men are afraid of books, and some are afraid of life; some do not understand books, and some do not sympathize with, nor care to understand life. Literature is the key to the door of life for those who wish to open! There is no wall cramping the ambitions, blinding the eyes, deafening the ears of those who seek their nutriment in the spiritual messages and solemn understandings of the greatest minds of the ages. The symbol of a man walking down the street with no heart to feel, nor mind to understand the happenings about him, is the relationship between two stones. To our knowledge there is no known communication between one and the other. Literature is the great communicator, the powerful disseminator of sympathies, the magnificent doorway through which we can pass to other men's hearts, and obtain warmth for our own in case ours are cold and comfortless.
God said, "Let there be light," and there was light. Perhaps there is not enough, for we all walk in partial darkness, but the tremendous sunburst that is here to lighten and revive is the lasting, printed word, handed on from generation to generation.
CHAPTER II
AN OPEN DOOR
This world's no blot for us,