Perhaps I may not see it again, or its grand neighbor, the château, that secular shrine of a vivacious and select Past. But I shall need no Michelin, or Baedeker, or Joanne, to guide my memories thither. They are with me, every moment and breath of them, for my perpetual delight, a safe possession, unweakened and undimmed; and to conjure them before me it needs no more than the haunting syllables of Chenonceaux and the quaint, cherished volumes of the patronne.

IN CHENONCEAUX
My noiseless thoughts, if changed to their just sound
Amid these courts of silence once so gay
With love and wit, that here full pleasure found
Where Kings put off their crownèd cares to play,
Would shake in laughter at some jest unheard;
Would sing like viols in a saraband;
Would whisper kisses—but express no word
That would not be too dim to understand.
Like to a child, who far from ocean's flood
Against his ear a shell doth fondly hold
To hear the murmur that is his own blood,
And half believes the fairy-tale he's told,
So I within this shell mistake my sea
Of musing for the tide of History.

The Other Side
By Margaret Sherwood

LIKE every other attentive reader of our periodical literature, I am increasingly aware of our persistent exposure of sin and wrong-doing in high places and in low; like many another attentive reader, I am growing a bit rebellious against this constant demand and supply in the matter of information regarding recent evil. Have we not grown over-alert in the search for this special kind of news? We take vice with our breakfast porridge; perjury with our after-dinner coffee; our essayists vie with one another in seeing who can write up the most startling story of crimes; and it is a bankrupt family nowadays that cannot produce one member to expose civic or political corruption. Undoubtedly much genuine ethical impulse lies back of all this; undoubtedly, too, much of the picturesque and spectacular treatment springs from a desire to startle, and ministers, in many a reader who would scorn paper-covered fiction, to a love of the sensational. Surely it must seem to the people of other countries that we take pride in the immensity of our sins, as we take pride in Niagara, in the length of the Mississippi, in the extent of our western plains.

Many may be, and must be, the good effects of throwing the searchlight upon dark places, but the constant glare of the searchlight bids fair to rob us of our normal vision of life. My poor mind has become a storehouse of misdeeds not my own. I am sick with iniquity; I walk abroad under the shadow of infamy, and I sup with horrors. I shrink from meeting my friends,—not that they are not the best people in the world, but I dread lest they pour into my ears some newly acquired knowledge of wrong-doing. For me, as for others, the sun of noonday is clouded by graft, bribery, treachery, and corruption; and I fear to close my eyes in the dark because of the pictured crimes that crowd before them. Suppose poor Christian had had to drag after him not only his own bag of transgressions, but those of Mr. Worldly Wiseman, Mr. Facing-both-ways, and all the denizens of Vanity Fair, what chance would he ever have had of getting out of the Slough of Despond?

It is not that I wish to shirk; I am not afraid of facing anything that I ought to know, and I have not the slightest doubt that we are all, in great measure, responsible for our neighbors' sins. But I am not sure that we are taking the wisest way to mend them. It seems to me incontestable that, with the large issues of individual and of national well-being in mind, we are over-doing the exposure, and slighting the incentives to right action; emphasizing the negative at the expense of the positive; and that, with our weakening convictions regarding the things that are right, it is dangerous to go on loudly proclaiming the things that are wrong. We are much in the position of a village improvement society which has pulled down a bridge because it is rotting, and is impotent to build another and a better. We have invested our national all in wrecking machinery, and have nothing left for constructive tools. It is said that in our explosive setting forth of civic and national wrong-doing, we are all too prone to stop with the explosion, as if mere knowledge of these things would set them right. Mere knowledge never yet set anything right; only the ceaselessly active, creative will can fashion a world of law out of chaos.

Of the criticism often made that exposure of wrong should be followed, more closely than is done here, by constructive action, if anything is to be really effected, it is not my task to speak. The aspect of the matter which interests me especially concerns the youth of the land; it is the educational aspect. Not through loud wailing over evil can a nation be built, but through resolute dwelling with high ideals. In certain ugly tendencies of recent years among the young, as, for instance, the unabashed sensuality of much of the modern dancing, may we not detect, perhaps, a cynical assumption that life is at basis corrupt,—a natural result of continued harping on evil things, and of failure to keep before them images of moral beauty? Our magazine writers would be far better employed, if, instead of making our ears constantly resound with reports of civic iniquities, they were, part of the time at least, studying Plato's Republic, and filling mind and soul with the hope of the perfect state. Wrong things we dare hope are of small and fleeting consequence as compared with the right; it is not the sin of Judas Iscariot, but the righteousness of his Master, that has brought the human race a gleam of hope and possible redemption. When I was told, not long ago, of a student in one of our great universities who had elected 'Criminology 16,' I could not help reflecting that he might far better have taken Idealistic Philosophy I.

Whether or not our study of evil should be lessened, our study of the good needs to be vastly strengthened. We are losing the vision! 'Your old men shall dream dreams, your young men shall see visions,' said the prophet, in promising wonders in the heavens and in the earth, after his account of fasting, weeping, mourning, and beating the breast. There is a time for beating the breast and for tearing the hair, and of this we have had our day, but perpetual sitting upon the ash-heap and howling will not raise the walls of state. Sitting there may, in time, even become a luxury; can it be that we are doing so much of it partly because it is easier, and because the heaven-sent task of building up and shaping is too hard for us?