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 thing notable. The true sacred books of the Mormons are their own chronicles. They have histories comparable with Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus. They lived in "bondage," they suffered ferocious persecution, they wandered in the wilderness, they entered "the land of Canaan," they built a tabernacle to their God, and the story of these deeds is a moving, heroic and often majestic portion of our national narrative, which deserves all the reverence due to any great chapter in the tearstricken, blood-stained annals of mankind.

It is to be remembered, however, that Joseph Smith's "revelations" were not a substitute for the Bible in Mormon culture, but a supplement to it. They had a special work to perform in their time. They worked! They achieved their purpose. In the minds of Joseph Smith's followers, they established as flaming truths two grand propositions which were of utmost value in converting a democratic mob into a marching militant nation: that God still lived and spoke to men; and that Joseph Smith was his prophet and must be obeyed to the letter.

Mr. Werner, after expressing his skepticism of prophets, appropriately quotes Carlyle's heated assurance that no hollow quack ever founded a religion. Joseph Smith was a quack, but not hollow. He gripped with both hands two mighty principles of order: the principle of absolute authority and the principle of absolute obedience; and he held them fast, through all his vagaries, till he was assassinated in the jail at Carthage, Illinois, in 1844. His apostles recognized that Joseph had got hold of something invaluable, and they upheld him through thick and thin. On the rock of his principles, Joseph Smith built his church, organized his militia, governed his curiously chartered

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 city of Nauvoo. If it was destined, as it now seems to have been, that several thousands of superstitious, credulous, hungry, pioneering "democrats" should be drawn out from the unruly American rabble of 1840, disciplined, drilled, welded into a firm homogeneous religious society and planted in the wilderness as the seed of a new state, then Joseph Smith was a truly "inspired" man.

He was killed at just the right time, retrospectively speaking. His work was done. His principle of authority and his principle of obedience were firmly implanted among his followers and his martyrdom sanctified his work. He turned over to his successor a political-religious machine which was in admirable running order and surpassed Tammany Hall by the inclusion of polygamy. Polygamy, though not openly promulgated in Nauvoo, was extensively practised, and so far as spiritual affairs were concerned, Brigham Young had little to do but to "carry on" and work out details. Mr. Werner draws a sharp line between the character of Joseph and that of his successor, and nearly all his admiration goes to Brigham Young. Being a very skeptical, very modern biographer, Mr. Werner, I think, rather undervalues "fire from heaven"; and consequently rather underestimates the "genius" of Joseph Smith and tends to overlook the strict adequacy of his response to his opportunity.

I share, however, Mr. Werner's admiration for Brigham Young and think him in most respects immensely Joseph Smith's superior. He was not spiritually as impressionable as Joseph, but he had a vast deal more of common sense. He was born a governor of men and women and he was always working at his job. It was said of him that he slept with one eye

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 open and one foot out of bed. He encouraged his people to come to him with their pettiest troubles and he required them to consult on every undertaking of importance. He had at their disposal a sagacity which frequently dictated counsel of which Benjamin Franklin might have been proud. A woman rushed to him in tears to complain that her husband had told her to go to hell. Brigham Young looked at her solemnly and said, "Well, don't go; don't go." As advice it is perfect.

The outstanding virtue in Brigham Young by which he insensibly modified the entire character of Mormonism and modernized it was this: He knew how to do everything himself and he thought and preached that it was disgraceful and unmanly to ask God's assistance until one's own resources were entirely exhausted. He didn't like whining. "If you have any crying to do, wife, you can do that along with the children, for I have none of that kind of business to do." Discoursing on prayer he said: "While we have a rich soil in this valley and seed to put in the ground we need not ask God to feed us, nor follow us around with a loaf of bread begging of us to eat it. He will not do it, neither would I were I the Lord." He had received the prophetic mantle from Joseph Smith and might at any time have asked, as Joseph had done constantly, for divine revelations about the organization of his masterly exodus from Illinois and about a thousand details concerning the foundation of his city. Except on very rare occasions, and then mainly for the look of the thing, Brigham Young dispensed with special revelations. They really were not necessary, and so he could dispense, too, with flummery. He had a bland forehead and serene and humane eyes, but his

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 head was as hard as a keg of nails and his mouth closed like a bear trap. He, too, had his vision. He gripped with both hands two vital principles, the preservation of life and the perpetuation of the species. "I am very kind," he said, "but know how to rule." Unquestionably he did.

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ESUS was born in the artisan class and rose to be an original teacher among a people who made a rigorous religious ritual out of the way their ancestors had washed the dishes, and that sort of thing. His imagination was molded by the history and traditions of his own people, but the fresh life in him revolted from the suffocatingly traditional forms in which academic minds attempted to fix the spiritual activities of the time. Though at maturity he did not hold with the ascetic sects, in early middle life he was much influenced by the preaching of John, an ascetic in the style of the elder prophets. John was attempting to produce a penitential movement in expectation of a savior of the people, whose coming was a matter of ancient prediction.

Jesus became convinced that he himself was the foretold savior. He fostered that belief in his followers. Of the bystanders, some said that he was "a good man" and others said that he was "misleading the people." Indisputably, they were both right. Jesus was a good man. Jesus did mislead the people in ten thousand tragic ways.

It seems clear, however, that he himself contemplated no such exodus from the power of the Roman law as the multitude hoped for, but rather an escape into an inner world of "spiritual freedom." He desired

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 less a refuge from Roman taxes than from the dead hand which the Jewish rabbis laid upon his spirit. It is obvious that his conception of new birth and new life in a loving creative activity was understood by few, if any, of the men and women who trooped after him, craving mental and physical healing, bread and fish, and power and place in the physical kingdom over which they persisted in believing he was to reign.

He was unable to explain his idea to the satisfaction of his own family. Even his most intimate friends misunderstood him absurdly, quarreled over left and right hand places in the throne room, and on one occasion went so far as to suggest that they should call down fire from heaven on a house which had refused them hospitality. As for the leading representatives of the established order among his countrymen, they regarded him as a dangerous radical, an habitual Sabbath-breaker, a blasphemer and a fomenter of sedition against the state—not to mention the fact that in his hotter moods he had designated them personally as liars and vipers.

From the Jewish point of view there was abundant evidence to support all these charges. Furthermore, the cures and resurrections attributed to Jesus seem not to have impressed the hierarchy as they impressed the common people. They regarded them as orthodox physicians regarded the miracles of M. Coué. That the Roman Pilate was not offended by his breaking the Jewish Sabbath or by his identifying himself with the Jewish God or by his assumption of the Jewish kingship, temporal or spiritual, was irrelevant to the Jewish case against him.

Jesus, as we must suppose, did his best to explain and justify himself to his own generation. On the

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 whole, he failed tragically. He spoke puzzlingly, paradoxically and poetically, and failed to find any common ground with most of his hearers. He died leaving no written testament.

In the course of time four of his followers wrote short biographies of him, comprising recollections or hearsay as to what he had done and said, amid which they mingled the guesses of "average" men—tax collectors, physicians and the like—as to who he was and what he really meant. Three of these biographers got their leading idea largely from traditional sources; and accordingly they made much of the supernatural birth, miracles and fulfillments of prophecy. The fourth, who seems to have written much later, was a mystic with access to experience and forms of thought which appear to have been quite alien to the harlots and publicans and the Scribes and the Pharisees to whom Jesus had tried to convey his message.

Yet whether or not they fully comprehended his mission, from the earliest time to the present day, people in increasing numbers have believed, or suspected, that there was focused in this obscure Nazarene an extraordinary power, perhaps a unique power, to relieve hearts of their burdens and to replace the burdens with a sense of abundant life and happiness. The four little biographies, for example, make mention of a number of persons, both men and women, who seem to have troubled themselves little about the fulfillment of prophecy or difficult questions regarding the Logos or the Godhead; but they went straight, by a kind of bee instinct, to the source of the Master's fascination for them.

They did not attempt to fathom or explain him. They loved him and they loved one another, as he

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 had loved them; and thus instinctively they fulfilled what the adorable mystic who wrote the fourth Gospel called his "new commandment." In this love, clearly a new sort of love to most of them—especially to women like Mary of Magdala and the Samaritan water drawer—in this love, characterized by a peculiar sense of "light" and "life," they found themselves at the center of a strange power which enabled them to operate all the necessary laws of conduct from within, and to bear all the pain and sorrow of life—and death itself—smiling.

The quality and intensity of their devotion, at once childlike and passionate, is suggested to us by recollection of the woman who sat on the floor kissing the feet of Jesus all through the dinner while the host performed the usual courtesies. She had become quite literally childlike, and was therefore qualified for this extraordinary new "kingdom," and was a fit companion for the beloved disciple, for the ecstatic St. Francis, for Thomas à Kempis, for Saint Theresa, for Saint Joan, for Vaughan, for Blake singing his songs of innocence, and declaring to the organized church:

It is possible, of course, that if Jesus had reappeared many centuries later, he might have concluded that a man's ability to do good work in the world is dependent on his wealth and his membership in various powerful organizations. He might have taken to bishops and deans who mixed in politics and wrote filthy satires and edited old plays and fought for the

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 perpetuation of ancient creeds and doctrines devised by the savage bulls and frantic eunuchs of the church during the duskier ages of the world.

But if he looked to-day for the ardor of his first friends and for the childlike spirit which he declared was prerequisite for admission to his fellowship, one is rather at a loss to know where he would find it, unless, perchance, in the radiant face of some Salvation Army lass in the street, with the "bread of God" on her lips; or in the chant of some Negro woman, toiling all day over the tubs and singing with serene pathos:

In the lack of a lucid and completely intelligible explanation of his ability to make his lovers radiantly happy, the humbler laity and the learned theologians connected his power for centuries with interruptions of the order of nature and with certain business transactions in heaven. A few theologians still survive who attempt to account for magic by logic. And some simple folk still believe that the power of Jesus to confer a sense of abundant life and happiness is somehow dependent upon and knit up with his power to make wine out of well water.

But the plain people of my own acquaintance regard most of the Oriental interruptions of nature as puerile when compared with the wonders that any Occidental farmer can work when he gets into harmony with nature by the aid of half a dozen modern inventions. And so the once fiery miracle question is rather fading away. The theological questions, too.

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 And yet religion, as Mr. Irwin Edman shows in a remarkable article on "Religion for the Faithless," an article beautifully glowing with the mystical ardor of the intellect—religion is something that we don't get away from; it is a necessary and inevitable form and mode of our innermost living.

Only the intelligent layman, when, like the curious Greeks, he "would see Jesus," when he wishes to draw near to a master of religious living, turns more and more away from the theologians to the accredited interpreters of magic—turns to men who use their imaginations when they attempt to explain that colossal imagination which imagined Christendom and dreamed of a kingdom of heaven within the realm of Herod Antipas and in the city of Mayor Hylan.

But these literary men, object historical students and serious pious people, we don't want them and their unlicensed imaginations filling the space between us and Jesus. We wish the truth and nothing but the truth. "Renan, indeed," says William G. Hutchinson, prefacing "The Life of Jesus," "is a good instance of the egoistic historian, the narrator who is rather lyrical than dramatic; the Jesus with whom he presents us is a Renanized Jesus—a Jesus who is gentle, ironical, at times almost gay—a Jesus, in short, who in many features resembles M. Ernest Renan. But what would we have?"

What, indeed? So it has been from the beginning. The Jesus of Matthew was a Matthewized Jesus, of John a Johnized Jesus, of Paul a Paulized Jesus. Every man finds his own Jesus as he finds his own God; and in neither does he discover aught that was not previously patent or latent in himself. This is

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 as true of generations as of individuals; and this explains why Jesus enjoys a resurrection at every Easter when the lilies come up, and at the beginning of every generation, when young people appear with new culture and new hearts.

I can remember the appearance, a generation ago, of the sstheticized Christ, who was developed out of Renan's Jesus and out of Pre-Raphaelite art by young men without Renan's immense Semitic scholarship, but with more than his allowance of sentiment and sensuousness and sensibility to Syrian wild flowers. I can recall the exotic passions of the Salome, the Herodias and the John Baptist of Oscar Wilde and Sudermann; and Rostand's Jesus, "æsthetically" comparing the lines of the Samaritan woman's figure with the jug which she rests on the well-curb; and Oscar Wilde in "De Profundis," hymning Jesus as the exquisite esthete, the romantic artist, and setting the tragic story of the passion to the flute and oboe music of that period of life when he snatched at vice as an enlargement of experience, a lifting of the horizon—and then at repentance, as another enlargement of experience, a fresh lifting of the horizon.

You may argue all day and perhaps prove by sunset that the Jesus of Wilde and of Rostand was utterly inconsistent with the Jesus of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John; but it would be rather vain to attempt proving that the esthetic sensibility of these poets and their period was utterly inconsistent with the Son of God. Instinctively as I resent the intrusion of fin-de-siècle estheticism between me and the conception of the Holy Land and its characters, which I inherited from Puritan interpreters, I am constrained to admit that my

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 doctrinal treatise on the "Book of Jonah" by the Archbishop of Canterbury cannot compare with the sensuous studies of these esthetes for bringing alive in my imagination the heat and fragrance of the Palestinian spring.

Gabriel Miro's "Figures of the Passion of Our Lord," though not published in Spain till 1917, and only now translated into English, belongs in spirit to the period of fervently esthetic interpretation, and is more impressive as a work of creative imagination than as a work of piety. Its author is of Jesuit upbringing, enamored of landscape and mountain scenery, and temperamentally enriched with the æsthetic melancholy of the later romanticists. His imagination is passionate, colorful, sensuous, with a touch of Latin morbidezza.

In painting the scenes and telling the stories of the Passion, he seizes, like Flaubert, in his Carthaginian picture, upon all its exotic possibilities, its luxury, its cruelty—like the merciless painters of the early Renaissance, he counts the blood drops under the lash. He revels in the Herodian pomp and the sumptuous softness of the Roman procurator's palace and in the subtle degeneration of his mind. Not in isolation and in little companies does he see the protagonist moving toward his doom, but with his pitiful broken humanity poignant against the riotous springtime, drenched in odors of tropical fruits, winding toward Calvary against the buzz and brilliance of Oriental bazaars, and all the scent and hum and murmur of the Roman East.

As a specimen of his quality, consider this passage in which Claudia, the wife of Pilate, her hips partially thrust forward from the bedstead of marble and lemonwood, tells of her warning dream:

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Giovanni Papini, in his voluble, not to say garrulous, and, as I find it, almost unreadable "Life of Christ," turned away from all that ornate estheticizing, with execrations on the "decadents," because he had become a good Catholic and wished to become a best seller.

Mary Austin turns away from all that because it really does not interest her. In "A Small Town Man," published originally in 1915, and now republished with revisions and a more explicit statement of her conclusions, Mary Austin comes to the interpretation of Jesus, as every sincere interpreter must, with just what she has of her own that can give her an original and personal view. She has, she assures us, studied her Biblical literature, topography, ethnography, etc.,

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 patiently, carefully, like other scholars. She gives God thanks and makes no parade of that; she even, with a slight ostentation of superiority to scholarship, calls attention to her deliberate omission of footnotes.

She comes to her task, as I take it, with these special preparations of her insight: birth and upbringing in a small Illinois town at just about that stage of religious petrifaction, of stiff-necked killing literalism, which Jesus encountered in Capernaum. To this she adds years in the rainless places of California and the Southwest, studying Indian folklore, poetry and religion—in short, the elements of barbaric culture, such as Hebrew tradition carefully preserved from the ancient times when Jehovah first entered upon bloody competition with the gods of the heathen, whose fat of rams and oxen smoked over against his. She brings an intimate, almost a first-hand, acquaintance with the universality and the deep natural significance of spring festivals and of the atoning sacrifice among primitive peoples, without which no modern commentator can speak with authority of the Doctrine of Atonement. Furthermore, Mrs. Austin has been for years a, student of the psychology of "genius," a phenomenon which she keeps under constant observation. Finally, as she reminds us, she has the intuitions of a woman, and she is proud of it.

Mrs. Austin comes to Jesus as an equal and treats him as such. I mean precisely that. She comes to him as a small-town mystic and she treats him as a small-town mystic. Her writing here is clear and free from the pseudo-scientific jargon into which she sometimes lapses. Her insight appears to me remarkable, and her treatment of the problem far more illuminating, consistent and persuasive than that of Signor

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 Papini. Her book deserves wide reading. I suspect there are many people whom it, together with a thoughtful reading of the Gospel of John, would persuade that they are not altogether "faithless." Certainly her "psychological" approach brings us infinitely nearer to the magic of Jesus—to the source which inspired St. Francis, Thomas à Kempis, and the haunting negro "spirituals" than either the "esthetic" approach of the "decadents" or the cold ethical approach of rationalizing churches. She has as good a right to her Jesus as St. Augustine had to his, or as the Rev. Dr. Haldeman has to his.

What Mrs. Austin possesses above any recent commentator that I have seen is a sense for the "mystical moments" in the experience of Jesus, without which he is inexplicable—moments when he followed "the inward voice, followed it instinctively with the freedom of a river in its natural channel, with no fretting of the flesh. But where the voice left him uninformed he was simply a man from Nazareth: his social outlook was the outlook of a villager." Only a person who has known some of these moments when the mind with light on its wings goes straight to the mark "like a homing pigeon through the pathless"—only a person, I think, with such experience can make Jesus come alive for us in his most exalted moods, as thus:

At this latitude the sky retains its blueness on until midnight, the stars are not pricked in on one plane, but draw the eye to the barred door of space. A man praying here all night on one of these open hill-fronts might think he heard them swinging to their stations, might hear without any fancying, the heavy surge of the Mediterranean roll up along the western buttress of the Bridge. At dawn the fishing fleet would

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 break out of the lake towns like doves out of a dovecote, and caravans, starting early to avoid the heat of the day, begin to crawl along the Wâdi el Haman. Hours such as this God flowed into him, filled and overfilled him.

The peril of the mystic is fire without an altar, which is a more splendid peril, though none the less a peril, than an altar without a fire. Mrs. Austin's study of the mystical Jesus needs to be supplemented and completed; and an excellent supplement is at hand in Dr. James Moffatt's "Everyman's Life of Jesus." Dr. Moffatt is a distinguished Biblical scholar who has made a modern translation of the Old and the New Testaments. In this book he makes one continuous narrative of the life of Jesus in the words of the four Gospels, arranging the incidents, however, freely in accordance with his own sense. I have long been profoundly averse to revised versions and rearrangements, being firmly convinced that I did not wish my religious poetry "improved" by a modern hand. Dr. Moffatt has temporarily converted me, which means that his Jesus comes alive for me, as for him.

The worth and persuasiveness of this little book reside largely in the introductions which precede each chapter and interpret the material of the Gospel narrative from a point of view which, Dr. Moffatt believes, should make his Jesus accessible and appealing to every man. Jesus himself always implied, he declares, "that true religion is more endangered by 'religious' people than even by the irreligious, and his moral indignation burned against religious leaders who were responsible for the sin of misrepresenting God."

Dr. Moffatt, though both religious and scholarly,

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 shuns the dead phrases of the scholar and the pietist, and when he has occasion to cite another authority he rarely brings in an orthodox believer. He turns by preference to those men of imagination, spiritually quick, who from time to time have had glimpses of Jesus as fresh and strange as the vision seen early in the morning by those women, who, through their tears, mistook him for the gardener. Dr. Moffatt appeals to Emerson, to Jefferies, to Renan, Pascal, St. Francis, Blake, Mill, Shorthouse, De Quincey. He rescues Jesus from our own Scribes and Pharisees, and assorts him with men who use words sensitively.

His Jesus differs in important respects from the mystical villager of Mary Austin. Dr. Moffatt has studied the cause through its historical effects, and he does not pretend to divest himself of the impressions derived, for example, from having in his ears the Latin hymns of the Middle Ages. Every man's Jesus to-day is, as a spiritual force, what the "Christian ages" have made him, and his effect upon Renan is as truly an aspect of his personality as his effect upon Matthew. Dr. Moffatt's Jesus is less instinctive than Mary Austin's, more intellectual, more consciously the iconoclast and the moral revolutionary. He aims at a radical and democratic regeneration. He definitely makes light of dietary regulations, Sabbatarianism and all caste feeling. He sweepingly substitutes the spirit and custom of forgiveness and pardon for the custom of judgment and the ancient law of retaliation. He aspires toward a society in which racial prejudice and nationalistic ambition shall disappear in a brotherly comradeship embracing all men who are active for good in the world.

Great experiences like to be met half way. If we

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 desire the "realizing sense" of this personality, of which the faithful used to speak in former times, we shall have to use, I fancy, the "means of grace" available to our times. Even if you reckon yourself among Mr. Irwin's "faithless," you are fairly certain to find, if you let Dr. Moffatt throw his light on the ethical substance of Jesus, and if you let Mary Austin kindle that substance with a core of mystical fire, and Gabriel Miro paint the scenes and portray the visible drama of the Passion—you are fairly certain to find Jesus walking in your imagination through the Easter lilies—toward you, full of grace and truth.

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N "Memoirs of the Harvard Dead in the War Against Germany," Mr. M. A. De Wolfe Howe has built quite the best war memorial that I have ever seen—better than cannon and monuments in parks, better than crossed swords and flags in museums and armories, better than the yards of inscribed brass plates which are crowding the epitaphs of deans and bishops from the walls of English cathedrals, better than groves and chimes of bells, better than flowers and the flickering flame which quicken emotion by the grave of the Unknown Soldier lying under the shadow of the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, emblazoned with the victories of Napoleon and the names of his famous marshals.

I call this the best form of war memorial because it is intimately personal and holds us in lively remembrance of the young lives that are gone. It does not allow the mind to relax and rove among vague grandiose conceptions of military glory and embattled nations and warring machines and angels and horsemen of the Apocalypse, but keeps it closely fixed upon the spirited, lovable, gentlemanly boys from Groton and St. Paul's and the Roxbury Latin School, with a Harvard finishing, who, so far as Harvard is concerned, seemed necessary for conducting the most dangerous parts of the dirty and bloody business of bringing peace on earth and good will to men by the sword.

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 I am well aware that an increasing number of people nowadays resent all reference to dead soldiers which gives any satisfaction to the survivors. They will not admit that there are any good war memorials, except such narratives as those of Latzko, Duhamel, and Barbusse, such dramas as "What Price Glory?", such poems as Sandburg's "Unknown Soldier," such novels as the "Three Soldiers" of John Dos Passos and Thomas Boyd's "Through the Wheat," which expose the futility, horror, and degradation of war and bitterly and scornfully asperse every one responsible for sending men into battle. There are even extremists who hold that dead soldiers should be asked to make one more sacrifice for the living and consent to oblivion. I do not hold with them. But their presence and the diffusion among us of mordant skepticism regarding "military glory" render it difficult to write or even to feel quite simply and happily any longer about those who gave "the last full measure of devotion."

Mr. Howe himself has recognized this difficulty. His thin volume of verse, almost privately distributed, "The Known Soldier," from which I have borrowed my title, shows him to have been through the war decade a supporter of the war President, a militant pacifist, who swallowed in good faith the slogan "the war to end war." When in 1918 he undertook these truly monumental memoirs, it was not generally considered an index of subnormal intelligence to believe that benign consequences would flow from the World War. In the preface to his first volume, which appeared in 1920 and dealt with the thirty men who eagerly ran to meet their death before the United States consented to enter the struggle, it was still possible for Mr. Howe

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 to write with fervent simplicity of the vanguard, ever to be remembered with gratitude—"the men who sealed with their blood the pledge of that overwhelming sentiment in favor of the Allies which was to make our country an active participant in the fight."

But in the preface of his fifth and final volume, which appeared in 1924, Mr. Howe's ardor for fighting along the path to peace has been sicklied o'er with the pale cast of current thought. "In the ten years since the World War began," he observes, "and especially since it ended, the very theme of war has taken on a new aspect, both for those who read and for those who write about it." He suspects, has had occasion to suspect, that the fruits of victory have been devoured by "the damned politicians"—Mr. Howe quotes the phrase.

As a biographer and as a citizen he begins to surmise that he will have to take his satisfaction less in what these young heroes actually achieved than in the fine gallantry and unselfishness which they exhibited. He indulges in little glorification of the abstract fighting spirit. He can't make himself happy any longer by murmuring "It is the cause, my soul." More and more he finds the cause which moves his heart in the individual. He bends over the known soldier, studies him as a son, as a school boy, in college among his clubs and "activities," as a sportsman, as a young man in business, in law, medicine, dentistry, as a comrade and friend in desperate enterprises and in the agony of death. The individual stands the test. He rejoices to think that the three hundred and seventy-three men whose memoirs he and his associates have written are but specimen Americans—are, indeed, but

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 a thirtieth part of the Harvard men who were in the war.

My predominant desire is to emphasize the fact that the best way to regard these memoirs is not as obituaries, but as lives of the American educated class, edited by a capital biographer, the first three volumes wholly written by him—lives of all sorts of American college men drawn into one tragic story by their relation to one college and to the war, but even more profoundly unified and linked with all of us by their relation to one country, its culture, and its ideals. Every American university has materials for a record similar to this. This record happens to be—no, such things, alas! don't happen—this record is extraordinarily rich, and it has been handsomely made. I should like to persuade skeptics that they had better not pass it by as designed for a special audience or for respectful repose amid the dust of university archives. I wish to assure readers who feel no special interest in Harvard men as such, and who wish to forget the dead and to "study war no more," that here is an astonishing collection of materials for study of the great human qualities available for American life and the tasks of peace.

If, however, you are not in the skeptical class, which requires conciliation, you may be assured that Mr. Howe and his associates have brought out in these memoirs everything that can be said in honor of heroic virtues and fighting men and to the glory of Harvard and America militant. If your belief in the World War is unabated, if you instinctively honor young men who die at the behest of their country, if a relative of yours is commemorated here, if you feel an unmodified traditionaltraditonal [sic] satisfaction in the military exploits of

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 the sons of Harvard, you will read these volumes from first to last with intense interest and proud emotion, and you will be astonished that such a magnificent library of adventure has received so little attention from the press.

Here you will learn of one dead hero that he came of a long line of Harvard scholars; of another that he was sprung from excellent fighting stock; of another that his grandfather fought in the Civil War; of still another that his ancestors distinguished themselves in the Revolution and in the French and Indian wars. This young officer's father was a Mayor; that one's a President of the United States; the sire of this one was a famous New York clergyman; the grandfather of this one was Lincoln's Secretary of War; this boy was of the tenth generation from Elder Brewster; this "ace of aces" was descended from the colonel who crawled into the den after the wolf. They bred true, these fine old stocks. There are memoirs here which read like Pindaric odes, pouring a splendor of death and glory upon ten generations.

Here you will find, on the part of soldiers and their fathers and mothers, expressions of faith, of dedication, and of solemn sacrifice—sometimes even of joyous sacrifice. So great a hope, so clear a sense of duty, animated most of these volunteers that they felt bitterness only when the influenza or the pneumonia, more deadly than the bullet, made their free-will offering unavailing. "For many of them," says Mr. Howe, "Howard Rogers Clapp spoke when he wrote:

'It is much more than patria that we are fighting for now; it is the ending of such horrible pain and sorrow for all the generations that are to come after

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 us. It is a religious war, greater far than any of the old Crusades in its principles—principles that are greater and larger than Christianity itself.'

This is not a speech from the sidelines but from the firing line, and it may be set against that of the realistic politician who insists that "we merely went in to strafe the Hun."

Some of these men went into battle in mortal fear. Of one it is said: "He had a horror of war and was always very nervous when he went to the front, and yet he always volunteered for any dangerous mission." Others developed the sang-froid of Mercutio, fighting and taking their own death with a jest on their lips. Happiest of the dead, probably, were the first thirty—sportsmen, many of them, football and polo players and big game hunters, eager for the thick of the scrimmage.

For Victor Chapman, entrance into American aviation, declares his father, was "like being made a knight. It transformed—one might almost say transfigured—him. That the universe should have supplied this spirit with the consummation which it had sought from infancy and should have given in a few weeks complete happiness and complete fulfillment—the crown of life to which one can imagine no other perfect ending—is one of the mysteries of this divine age."

Of the same Hotspur breed were Hamilton Coolidge, Quentin Roosevelt, Norman Prince and young David Endicott Putnam, a boy of twenty, who had had some difficulty entering aviation on account of his youth, yet brought down five German planes in a day and gayly wrote to his mother on the evening of June 30, 1918:

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 "Dearest Mother: I wrote to you this morning and said that I would try to 'get' another boche in the evening. I did!"

Others there were, but, so far as these records show, few, like Alan Seeger, of brooding poetic temperament, with a fiery thirst for experience, snatching at death as if it were the last untasted cup of intoxication, and luxuriating in danger for the fuller, intenser sense of life that it gave in the allotted interval. After a year and a half of war, knowing well where of he spoke, Seeger wrote that he saw all life revolving about the twin poles of Love and Strife, in the macrocosm, and in the microcosm of his own emotions. Love was good, he held,

Doubtless there were a few men in this company with blood so hot or heart so fully satiated with ordinary experience that death in battle was, indeed, to them, as Mr. John Jay Chapman puts it, "the crown of life to which one can imagine no other perfect ending"; but the total impression that one gathers from a war memorial in which three hundred and seventy-three intelligent men are allowed to speak is very different from that.

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 The crown of Life? They imagined many other crowns!

Says André Cheronnet-Champollion, enlisted as a private in the French Army, and the third Harvard man to die in the war:

Writes Francis Reed Austin a couple of months before he got death and his Distinguished Service Cross for "extraordinary heroism in action near Haumont, France, November 11, 1918," at the age of twenty-one:

By candlelight in an old French fort. Oh, it is lovely here in a little living room for the officers, made just as homelike as any place I have ever been in. . . . You forget everything except home as you listen to the piano with the two big candles on each side of it, and then dark all around. The wonderful old tunes resound up into the towers and down the dark corridors. They are playing "Memories." It is wonderful, and I think of my childhood, and my family gave me the very happiest. Wouldn't it be great if I could give them just as happy an old age. Believe me, this war makes you really appreciate everybody

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 and everything. . . . Thank God, they know naught of war down here. . . . I don't know why I have written all this stuff, but the music has just guided my pencil, and after battered towns, dead bodies, suffering families and devastated fields all you most think of is love and beauty.

Says Captain Roger Fulton Goss, who died of influenza at Camp Greene, in North Carolina:

In the last memoir to which I shall call attention, a rather ordinary or "average" boy is commemorated—so I infer from an introductory paragraph in which, with inveterate Harvard condescension, the author reminds us that a certain number of undergraduates come from the "central states," with nothing but "the local high school" behind them, and yet have a "wholesome" influence in Cambridge.

Osric Mills Watkins, an Indiana boy in the American aviation section, aged twenty-one, who died of pneumonia at Bar-le-Duc in 1918, wrote three letters from France which constitute the body of his six-page life in the "Memoirs." In the first, in which he announces to his parents his decison to enter the air service, he says: "I promise you that I will do well in this; that I will face all things unafraid, both physical and abstract, as I have always tried to do in the

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 past." The other two letters were prepared to be sent in case of his death. To his mother he begins: "This isn't to be mailed until I've gone where all the good aviators go, honey. You are so wise and brave and cheerful that I know you can be as proud as you are sad at my death." But I can quote no more of this. It will be found in the fifth volume. The letter for his father I will quote in full, with no other comment than this: It has suggested to me more poignantly than any other page in these five volumes, packed with poignant suggestions, the incalculable costs of war:

Dearest Dad: When you get this I shall have gotten into a spin too close to the ground or something else equally foolish. I can faintly conceive of your grief, as I, too, have dreamed of sons that might one day have been mine. But if a man has lived well he dies well, as I believe; then know that I shall have held my head high before the Judgment Seat. I have committed my sins, but I am deeply ashamed of them, and I know that God will forgive them. I regret that I might not have lived to lighten your old age, father dear, and that I might not have given you a grandson; but it was not to be.

We have not written each other much, dad, but it has been somewhat unnecessary. We understand each other sufficiently well that we may leave things unsaid.

You have been a good father to me, dad. You'll never know how much I have loved and respected you. Even as I write I think of a hundred little ways in which you guided my faltering steps and molded my character. "I before E, except after C." I doubt whether I could ever have become as good a man as you. Evil desires followed me much. That was one reason I wanted to live.

They are just passing the window with the dead

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 body of a boy who fell while I was writing the first page of this. The poor boy never got his chance at the Huns. I hope I do. Whether I do or not, I shall be proud to have died for America.

I'll be with you in spirit, father, in the days to come. I hope it will be in my power to make you happy.

Your devoted son,OSRIC.

It was very obliging for these boys to die for us. But after a careful study of these three hundred and seventy-three personal records, I must say that it strikes me as rather a florid figure of speech on our part to declare that death was "the crown of life"—for them.

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text: Critical Woodcuts/Sherwood Anderson's Tales of the New Life


text: Critical Woodcuts/D. H. Lawrence Cultivates His Beard


text: Critical Woodcuts/Willa Cather and the Changing World


text: Critical Woodcuts/Floyd Dell on the Coast of Bohemia


text: Critical Woodcuts/Ben Hecht and the Supermen


text: Critical Woodcuts/Ellen Glasgow

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text: Critical Woodcuts/Rose Macaulay and Women


text: Critical Woodcuts/H. G. Wells

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text: Critical Woodcuts/Gallery 2

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text: Critical Woodcuts/Mr. Brownell on the Quest of Perfection


text: Critical Woodcuts/Chekhov, Chekhovians, Chekhovism


text: Critical Woodcuts/Llewelyn Powys

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text: Critical Woodcuts/R. L. S. Encounters the "Modern" Writers on Their Own Ground


text: Critical Woodcuts/Anatole France

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text: Critical Woodcuts/Oscar Wilde

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text: Critical Woodcuts/Pierre Loti and Exotic Love


text: Critical Woodcuts/Don Marquis, Poet

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text: Critical Woodcuts/William Osler

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text: Critical Woodcuts/H. L. Mencken as Liberator


text: Critical Woodcuts/Barrett Wendell

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text: Critical Woodcuts/Gallery 3

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text: Critical Woodcuts/Mandeville on the Seamy Side of Virtue


text: Critical Woodcuts/Boswell on His Own Hook


text: Critical Woodcuts/Laurence Sterne

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text: Critical Woodcuts/George Washington as Diarist


text: Critical Woodcuts/Brigham Young

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text: Critical Woodcuts/Interpreting Jesus

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Rh tending and caressing her little girl. One morning when the fast-falling snow was piling up high on every side she sat with the child in her arms, again and again going back in her mind over all the miseries of the past, and picturing to herself the yet more desolate days that were to come. It was long since she had gone into the front of the house. But this morning there was ice on the moat, and she went to the window to look. She was clad in many wraps of some soft, white, fluttering stuff, and as she stood gazing before her with hands clasped behind her head, those within the room thought that, prince’s daughter though her rival was, she could scarce be more lovely in poise and gesture than their lady in her snowy dress. Raising her sleeve to catch the tears that had now begun to fall the Lady of Akashi turned to the nurse and said: ‘If it were upon a day such as this, I do not think that I could bear it….’ And she recited the poem: ‘If country roads be deep in snow, and clouds return, tread thou the written path, and though thyself thou comest not, vouchsafe a sign.’ To comfort her the nurse answered through her tears: ‘Though the snow-drifts of Yoshino were heaped across his path, doubt not that whither his heart is set, his footsteps shall tread out their way.’ The snow was now falling a little less fast. Suddenly Genji appeared at the door. The moments during which she waited to receive him put her always into a state of painful agitation. To-day guessing as she did the purpose of his visit, his arrival threw her immediately into an agonizing conflict. Why had she consented? There was still time. If she refused to part with the child, would he snatch it from her? No, indeed; that was unthinkable. But stay! She had consented;

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40 and should she now change her mind, she would lose his confidence forever. At one moment she was ready to obey; a moment afterwards, she had decided to resist by every means in her power.

She sat by the window, holding the little girl in her arms. He thought the child very beautiful, and felt at once that her birth was one of the most important things that had happened in his life. Since last spring her hair had been allowed to grow and it was now an inch or two long, falling in delicate waves about her ears like that of a little novice at a convent. Her skin too was of exquisite whiteness and purity, and she had the most delightful eyes. To part with such a creature, to send her away into strange hands,—he understood well enough what this must mean, and suddenly it seemed to him that it was impossible even to suggest such a sacrifice. The whole matter was re-opened, and a discussion followed which lasted the better part of the day. ‘Whether it is worth while depends on you,’ she said at last. ‘It is in your power to make amends to the child for the disadvantages of its birth. And if I thought that you meant to do so…’ she was worn out by the long discussion, and now burst into tears. It was terrible to witness such distress. But the child, heedless of what was going on about it, was lustily demanding ‘a ride in the nice carriage.’ The mother picked it up and carried it in her own arms to the end of the drive. When she had set it down, it caught at her sleeve and in the prettiest, baby voice imaginable begged her to ‘come for a ride too.’ There framed themselves in the lady’s heart the lines: ‘Were all my prayers in vain, or shall I live to see the two-leaved pine from which to-day I part spread mighty shadows on the earth?’; but she could scarce speak the words, and seeing her now weeping wildly Genji

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Rh strove to comfort her with the verse: ‘Like the little pine-tree that at Takekuma from the big one grows, grafted to my deep roots long shall this stripling thrive secure.’ ‘Wait patiently,’ he added. She strove hard to persuade herself that he was right, that all was for the best. But now the carriages were moving away….

With the child rode the nurse and also a gentlewoman of good family called Shōshō, holding on their knees the Sword, the Heavenly Children and other emblems of royalty. In the next carriage followed a band of youths and little girls whom he had brought to form the child’s escort on the homeward way. All the time they were driving to the Capital Genji was haunted by the image of the sorrow-stricken figure that had watched their departure. Small blame to her if at the moment she was feeling bitterly towards him!

It was quite dark when they arrived. So soon as the carriages had been drawn in, Shōshō and the nurse began looking about them at the splendours amid which they were now destined to reside. They felt indeed (coming as they did from rural and quite unpretentious surroundings) somewhat awestruck and ill at ease. But when they were shown the apartments which had been set aside for the new arrival, with a tiny bed, screens-of-state, and everything which a little lady could require, all beautifully set out and arranged, they began to take heart. The nurse’s own room was in the corridor leading to the western wing, on the north side of the passage.

The child had fallen asleep during the journey and while she was carried into the house had not cried or seemed at all put out. She was taken straight to Murasaki’s room

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42 and there given her supper. After a while she began to look round her.

She evidently wondered why her mother was nowhere to be seen, and after a further search her little lips began to tremble. The nurse was sent for and soon succeeded in distracting her attention. If only, thought Genji, who had witnessed this scene—if only the mother in that slow country home could be as easily comforted! But now there was no way to make amends to her, save to see to it that never in one jot should the child’s care and upbringing fall short of what its mother might in her wildest dream have craved for it. For the moment indeed he accounted it a blessing that Murasaki had not borne him a child of her own, and was thus free to devote herself to the reparation of the wrong which he had inflicted upon this little newcomer by the circumstances of its birth. For some days the child continued occasionally to ask for its mother or some other person whom it had been used to see daily at Ōi, and when they could not be produced it would have a fit of screaming or of tears. But it was by nature a contented, happy little thing, and soon struck up a friendship with its new mother, who for her part was delighted to take charge of a creature so graceful and confiding. She insisted on carrying it about in her own arms, attended herself to all its wants and joined in all its games. Gradually the nurse became a personal attendant upon Lady Murasaki rather than the under-servant she had been before. Meanwhile a lady of irreproachable birth happened to become available as a wet-nurse and was accordingly added to the establishment. The ceremony of her Initiation did not involve any very elaborate preparations, but the child’s little companions were naturally aware that something was afoot. Her outfit, so tiny that it looked as though it came out of a doll’s-house, was a charming sight. So many people came

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 contribution to causes he had always had much at heart, a plea with which he rejoiced that the name of their family should have been associated. There were old things galore in Mansfield Square; the past, he considered, held its state there for those with the wit to make it out; and, should his young kinsman accept his bequest, he would find himself master of a scene in which a chapter of history—obscure, though not so remote as might perhaps have been wished—would perhaps by his intervention step more into the light. The generations at least had passed through it, clinging indeed as long as they might, and couldn't have failed to leave something of their mark, which it would doubtless interest Mr. Ralph to puzzle out. It was the testator's wish that he should do so at his ease. The letter in fine was, as Ralph said, a deucedly beautiful gentlemanly one, and the turn of the wheel of fortune. The material advantage might be uncertain; but it was blessedly not for the economic question, it was for the historic, the aesthetic, fairly in fact for the cryptic, that he cared. A big London house sounded in truth on the face of the matter less like an aid to research than like an exposure to rates and taxes, a legacy of the order vulgarly known as thumping. But verily too even London, for our rare young man, was within the pale of romance. His "other" passion in short had soon begun freshly to glow. 42


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Rh in and out of the house all day even at ordinary times that they hardly noticed the guests who had assembled in their little mistress’s honour. It was only when she raised her arms for the Binding of the Sleeves that the unwonted gesture caught their attention; they had never seen her in so pretty a pose before.

Meanwhile the mother at Ōi was all the more wretched because she now felt that her misery was self-inflicted. Had she been firm, the child might still be with her and life in some measure endurable. She could not believe that so extreme a course could really have been indispensable to its interests and bitterly repented of her docility. Even the grandmother, who had been foremost in urging the sacrifice, missed the baby sadly and went about the house with tears in her eyes. But news had reached them of the pains which Genji was bestowing upon its upbringing, and she felt no doubt that she had advised for the best.

A peculiar compunction prevented the Lady of Akashi from sending any gift or message to the child which was no longer hers, but she took immense pains in contriving presents for all its companions and attendants from the nurse downwards, and would spend hours in the matching of colours and the choosing of stuffs.

Genji did not at all want her to think that, now she had parted with the child, his visits were going to become any the less frequent, and though it was very difficult to arrange, he made a point of going out to Ōi before the turn of the year. It must at the best of times, he thought, be an uninteresting place to live in; but at any rate she had had the child to look after, and (what with getting it up and putting it to bed) that seemed to occupy a good deal of time. How she managed to get through the day now he could not imagine, and coming away from this visit with a heavy heart he henceforward wrote to her almost daily.

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44 Murasaki no longer showed any jealousy on this score, feeling, as it seemed, that the surrender of so exquisite a child needed whatever recompense Genji found it in his heart to bestow.

The New Year was ushered in by a spell of bright, clear weather. At the Nijō-in everything seemed to be going particularly well and, now that all the improvements were completed, an unusually large number of guests was entertained during the period of festivities. The older, married visitors came, as is customary, on the seventh day, bringing with them their children to assist in the ceremonies of congratulation; and these young visitors all seemed to be in excellent health and spirits. Even the lesser gentlemen and retainers who came to pay their respects, though no doubt many of them had worries and troubles enough of their own, managed to keep up, during these few days at any rate, an outward appearance of jollity.

The lady from the Village of Falling Flowers, who was now installed in the new eastern wing, seemed completely satisfied by her new surroundings. She had her work cut out for her in keeping up to the mark all the writing-women and young girls whom Genji had allotted to her service. Nor could she feel that she had gained nothing by her present proximity; for whenever he had a few moments to spare, he would come round and sit with her. He did not however visit her by previous appointment or stay at all late at night in her apartments. Happily she was by nature extremely unexacting. If what she wanted did not come her way, she at once assumed that this particular thing was not ‘in her destiny,’ and ceased to worry about it. This habit of mind made her quite unusually easy to handle, and he for his part lost no opportunity of publicly showing by his manner towards her that he regarded her as of scarcely less

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Rh consequence than Murasaki; with the result that those who came to the house felt they would be displeasing him if they did not pay their respects to her as well as to his wife; while stewards and servants saw that she was a person whom it would not be advisable to neglect. Thus everything seemed to be working very smoothly, and Genji felt that the arrangement was going to be a great success.

He thought constantly of the country house at Ōi and of the dull hours which the Lady of Akashi must be passing there at this season of festivity. So soon as the New Year celebrations both at his own house and in the Palace were drawing to a close, he determined to pay her another visit, and with this object in view he put on his finest clothes, wearing under his cherry-coloured cloak a matchless vesture of deep saffron hue, steeped in the perfumes of the scented box where it had lain. Thus clad he went to take his leave of Murasaki, and as he stood in the full rays of the setting sun, his appearance was so magnificent that she gazed at him with even greater admiration than was her wont. The little princess grabbed at the ends of his long wide trousers with her baby hands, as though she did not want him to go. When he reached the door of the women’s apartments she was still clinging to him and he was obliged to halt for a moment in order to disentangle himself. Having at last coaxed her into releasing him, he hurried down the corridor humming to himself as he did so the peasant-song ‘To-morrow I will come again.’ At the door he met one of Murasaki’s ladies and by her he sent back just that message, ‘To-morrow I will come again.’ She instantly recognized whence the words came and answered with the poem:

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46 ‘Were there on the far shore no person to detain your boat, then might I indeed believe that to-morrow you will come again.’ This was brought to him before he drove away, and smiling at her readiness of wit he answered: ‘In truth I will but look to my business and come back again; come back to-morrow, though she across the waters chide me as she will.’ The little girl did not of course understand a word of all this; but she saw that there was a joke, and was cutting the strangest capers. As usual the sight of her antics disarmed all Murasaki’s resentment, and though she would much rather there had been no ‘lady on the far shore,’ she no longer felt any hostility towards her. Through what misery the mother must be passing, Murasaki was now in a position to judge for herself. She continually imagined what her own feelings would be if the child were taken from her, never for an instant let it go out of her sight, and again and again pressed it to her bosom, putting her lovely teats to its mouth, and caressing it for hours together.

‘What a pity that she has never had one of her own!’ her ladies whispered; ‘To be sure if this were hers, she could not wish it different….’

Meanwhile the Lady of Akashi was setting herself to face with resolute calm the dullness and monotony of country life. The house had a curious charm of its own, which appealed very much to Genji during his visits, and as for its occupant,—he was astonished at the continual improvement in her looks. Indeed, had not that queer father of hers taken such extraordinary pains to prevent her ever mixing with the world, he believed there was no reason why she should not have done extremely well for herself. Yes, all she had needed was an ordinary father; even a rather shabby one would not have mattered. For such beauty and intelligence as hers, if once given the chance, could not have failed to pull her through. Each visit left him restless and

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 to thoroughly believe and understand it. I had associated intimately with many; and I imagined them to be sincerely attached to me. But now, they shrugged their shoulders—said the affair was strange—quite inexplicable—indeed, it was extraordinary how completely they had been deceived! But certainly I ought not to have founded my expectations on mere imagination. Most assuredly I was very much to blame!

Many were the similar phrases and reproaches which a poor man is frequently doomed to endure from his rich friends. How often, then, did my father’s favourite maxim, “it is better to be envied than to be pitied,” recur to me! But repining was vain. My little inheritance was soon in the hands of my creditors; and, as I found there was no reversion for me, I resolved to seek some employment by which I might support myself. After many a violent struggle with my pride, in this intention, I at last applied to the individuals who had already exhibited to me so much selfishness, and ingratitude. But, as I had anticipated, I was refused roughly, or sent away with empty promises.

I then determined to enter the Russian service; and to hide my humiliation and wounded feelings, far from my native land.

On the third night of my journey, I had the memorable dream which eventually decided my fate.

I thought that I was in a most beautiful garden, which I had often previously seen in my visions, but never when awake. It was beautifully and tastefully disposed after the English fashion; though, at that time, the knowledge of this foreign mode of horticultural arrangement was very rare in Germany. Among the most fragrant flowers and stately shrubs, the mossy roof of a small hermitage was conspicuous, on which the fiery rays of the setting sun shone flickeringly through the branches of the trees. While I was examining the flowers,

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Rh unsatisfied, and he found himself spending his time in continual goings and comings, his life ‘a tremulous causeway linking dream to dream.’

Sometimes he would send for a zithern and remembering the exquisite music with which she had beguiled those nights at Akashi, he begged her to play to him upon her lute. She would not now play alone; but she sometimes consented to accompany him, doing so with a mastery he could not imagine how she had contrived to acquire. The rest of the time was generally spent in minute recital of the little princess’s sayings and doings. Often he had come over on business connected with his new oratory at Saga or his estate at Katsura; and then there would perhaps be only time enough to eat a little fruit and dried rice with her at Ōi before he hurried back to town. On such occasions there was not time for intimacies of any kind; but the mere fact that he snatched at every chance of seeing her and that he did so without any attempt at concealment, marked her as one who held a not inconsiderable place in his affections. She was quite aware of this; but she never presumed upon it, and without any tiresome display of humility she obeyed his orders and in general gave him as little trouble as possible. By all that she could hear, there was not one of the great ladies at Court with whom he was on so intimate a footing as with herself; indeed, he was said to be somewhat stand-offish and difficult of approach. Were she to live closer at hand he would perhaps grow weary of her, and in any case there would certainly be unpleasant rivalries and jealousies. Thus or in some such way may we suppose the Lady of Akashi to have reconciled herself to these brief and accidental visits. Her father, despite his disavowal of all worldly interests, was extremely anxious to hear how Genji was behaving towards his daughter and constantly sent messengers to Ōi to pick up

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 especially a many-leaved dazzling white rose, of a species I had never before seen, the door of the hermitage opened, and a maiden advanced. I shall not describe her further than by saying that I was so struck by her beauty that I stood as if rooted to the spot, and I knew not whether to consider the hermitage an earthly edifice, or the porch of Heaven, at which an angel appeared. Her dress was snow white and curiously embroidered with silver stars, as if to signify that her home was not the earth. She took up a watering pan which stood near her, and refreshed the drooping plants around, an action so human, that it induced me to believe, in spite of her singular attire, and preternatural beauty, that it was a mortal I saw, though the fairest that had ever wandered among flowers. She now passed, and gracefully inclined her head to me; but in the delight which this courtesy occasioned me, I awoke.

I was now obliged to think of pursuing my journey; but while I was at breakfast in the public room of the inn, I heard two strangers speaking in ecstacies of a splendid rosa unica, which was now in bloom in the Bentheim garden. I had always been very fond of flowers, and was the more desirous to see this rare and beautiful plant, as its description recalled to me that which I had beheld in my dream. In consequence of my inquiries, I was directed to a village; in the vicinity of which I found a magnificent garden, laid out, to my surprise, chiefly in the English style. I was enchanted by the variety of natural beauty in this lovely valley, now towering into stately rocks and hills, and now abounding in the most fragrant shrubs and flowing streams.

Amidst the collection of brilliant flowers and plants which the gardener pointed out to my notice, I had almost forgotten the rosa unica, when he turned into a side walk. I followed him, and suddenly found myself in the well-remembered spot 4em

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 I had seen in my dream. The white rose bloomed before me; and conspicuous in the red evening light, surrounded too by the most fragrant flowers and beautiful shrubs, appeared the mossy roof of the small hermitage. While I gazed around me in an amazement almost amounting to terror, the door of this building opened, and an angelic figure, clothed in white, advanced from it. It was the counterpart of the lovely vision I had beheld! Nothing was wanting but the silver stars on the spotless drapery. Then, as though fate had ordained that even their actions should correspond, she took the watering-pan, and gracefully refreshed the thirsty plants around her.

The gardener whispered to me,

“That is my young lady; we must not disturb her—she likes to walk here alone, in the evening.\”

When I turned away with my conductor, she perceived me. She slightly started; and a faint blush overspread her countenance; but quickly recovering herself, with the same gentle grace which had enchanted me in my dream, she inclined her head to me as she passed, and then slowly withdrew.

No words can express the thrilling feelings which this marvellous coincidence excited in me. Even those who may be the least disposed to regard dreams as possessing any mystic connection with the world of life and reality, yet, if in my place, could not have failed to acknowledge that this entire fulfilment of all the minutest particulars of mine, was almost miraculous. In my heart, I confess, it engendered the idea that some close intercourse between the lady and myself was destined to ensue; and already my wishes rambled out of the dusky sphere of anxiety, into the bright land of hope.

I heard now from my conductor that the name of this lovely creature was Adelaide; and that she was the daughter of the Baron Bentheim, to whom the castle and the extensive lands around belonged.

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 The design of the garden was almost entirely the work of the young lady, whose brother, a major in the Prussian service, and now in the field, frequently sent her the most rare and precious plants. The gardener was unwearied in praise of his fair mistress.

“Beautiful as she is,” said he, “her loveliness is almost eclipsed by her goodness of heart. A celebrated General lately solicited her hand; and the young lady, solely to please her father, gave her consent. But, soon after the betrothment, an extraordinary circumstance broke off the engagement. The bridegroom retracted his promise, and quarelled with the father of his bride, who challenged him; but, shortly before the day fixed for the duel, the General suddenly died.”

Again, the whole current of my feelings changed; the demon of curiosity was now at work within me, and I was anxious to hear the particulars of this strange circumstance. After repeated urgency, and much mysterious hesitation, the gift of a much larger sum than my necessities justified me in bestowing, induced the still reluctant menial to communicate to me the following strange detail.

One evening, when there were a great many guests in the castle, and also a detachment of military, the General insisted on occupying an apartment which went by the name of “The Silver Lady’s chamber.” It had been long uninhabited, as it possessed but a very evil repute, in consequence of the ill deeds which, it was asserted, had once been perpetrated within it.

All the histories, however, that were related to the General, respecting the apartment, only served to excite his ridicule, and to render him more anxious to fulfil his resolution. At last, the Baron, who, probably, did not himself give credence to the reports, yielded to his wishes; and ordered the room to be prepared for his guest. 2

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 What occurred to the General, in that chamber, the gardener did not know. He could only repeat to me the results of his visit, which certainly were such as to justify the suspicion of the existence of some mystery; and to excite the most eager curiosity to fathom it.

The consequence of this strange tale was, that I became doubly anxious to be introduced to the Baron. But he was then at court: and, after some consideration, I remembered that my present circumstances were not such as to obtain for me a very favourable reception from one so wealthy as was the father of the lady I admired. I, therefore, resolved to continue my journey; and, with this determination, I returned to the city. I lay down to rest, with the wish to see once more, at least in my dreams, the lovely Adelaide. But my disquietude of mind banished both dreams and sleep. Innumerable were the projects that floated in my brain—my vision and its marvellous fulfilment seemed to call on me to take some step to win so fair a prize as the lovely girl I had seen, however hopeless such an undertaking might at first appear.

After forming and rejecting many rash plans, I at last resolved to introduce myself to the Baron, and to offer him my services under a feigned name.

With this purpose, I rose early; and proceeded to the Bentheim garden, to endeavour to ascertain precisely when its noble owner might be expected. After wandering about for some time, I met my former companion, the gardener.

“How fortunate, Sir,” exclaimed he, “that you are here. The Baron is returned, and you may be introduced to him now, if you wish it.”

This announcement for the moment confounded me; and, with that strange, but common perversity, which frequently induces us to shrink from an unexpected fulfilment of our desires, I at first wished to decline the proposal. But the gar-

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 dener having stated that the Baron had inquired about the stranger who had visited his grounds on the previous evening, and expressed his regret that he was absent, I resolved to comply. My companion then made a sign to one of his assistants, who soon returned with the intelligence that his Lord expected me.

The Baron received me very politely. He spoke much of the new style of gardening, and listened attentively to my arguments in its favour. In the course of conversation, some allusion induced him to ask my name. In spite of all my previous preparation, I coloured deeply as I uttered the borrowed title of Ferdinand. I then told him the course of my studies, adding, that I was now in search of a situation. The Baron appeared pleased by this declaration; and, in a very kind manner, gave me to understand that he required an agent to assist him in conducting his affairs; adding, with a singular affability, and a confidence that entirely surprised me, that this office was at my service, if I chose to accept it, until some more eligible employment presented itself.

I was most grateful; and our arrangements were soon concluded; though it was so painful to me to receive a stated salary, that my hesitation on this point would, probably, have betrayed me, had not Adelaide fortunately at that moment entered the room. I looked upon her but once; and quickly agreed to the terms. What is the humiliation to which I would not have submitted for such a reward?

I thus became an inmate of her abode, and daily saw the idol of my heart, who every moment appeared to me more fascinating. The whole family was under her control; but she never abused the unlimited power which her father entrusted to her; and when she did firmly maintain her own opinion in opposition to that of others, the result invariably proved the superiority of her understanding.

I was soon thoroughly acquainted with the affairs committed

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 Within a month it had shaken him still harder, and all the more that, this time, his impatience had fallen and two or three of his illusions with it: his curiosity had sat down to its feast. He had encountered in London more business than he expected, but had not encountered what he most feared, the display of a swarm of litigants. This greatly eased his mind, since if injustice had been done it would have taken much from the savour of the feast. There was no nearer relative, it surprisingly seemed, no counter-claimant, no hint in the air of a satisfaction disputed. No unfortunate and expropriated person came, in a word, to light, and there was therefore neither a cause to defend nor a sacrifice to consider. The only thing really to consider in such a stroke of luck was its violation of the common law of prose. Life was at best good prose—when it wasn't bad; and Mr. Pendrel's succession was—all "town tenement" as it might be—poetry undefiled. It was none the less poetry that the value of the property was so easily ascertained to be high. Ralph reflected not even for a moment after he had been to see it that a fine country estate would have been more to his purpose. He had no purpose, he freely recognised, but to begin at once to cultivate whatever relation should seem most fruitful to his so suddenly acquired "stake" in an alien order. The circumstance of its being exactly what it was—of no greater extent, yet of no less dignity 43


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48 what news they could. Much of what he heard distressed and disappointed him; but frequently too there were signs and indications of a more encouraging kind, and he would grow quite elated.

About this time Lady Aoi’s father died. His name had carried great weight in the country and his death was a heavy loss to the present government. It so happened that the period during which he took part in public life had been marked by much disorder and unrest. A renewal of these upheavals was now expected and general depression prevailed. Genji too was much distressed, both for personal reasons and because he had been in the habit of delegating to the old Minister most of the public business which fell to his lot. He had thus managed to secure a reasonable amount of leisure. He saw himself henceforward perpetually immersed in a multiplicity of tiresome affairs, and the prospect greatly depressed him. The Emperor, though still only twelve years old, was extremely forward for his age both in body and mind, and although it was not to be expected that he should act alone, the task of supervising his work was not a difficult one. But for some years such supervision would still be needed, and unfortunately there was no one else to whom Genji could possibly entrust such a task. Thus the prospect of being able to lead the retired life which alone appealed to him was still remote, and he frequently became very discontented.

For some while he was occupied with the celebration of rituals and services on behalf of the dead man’s soul; these he carried out even more elaborately than did the sons and grandsons of the deceased. This year, as had been predicted, was marked by a number of disorders and calamities. The Palace was frequently visited by the most disagreeable and alarming apparitions, the motions of the planets, sun and moon were irregular and unaccountable, and clouds

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 to my charge, and with the localities of my new abode. Most fortunately I conducted my superintendence to the perfect satisfaction of the Baron; and where my knowledge failed, Adelaide assisted me with her advice.

Whenever I proposed any alteration in a ruined tower which was by far the oldest part of the castle, the Baron invariably interrupted me by saying,

“Let it remain as it is for the present.”

I soon observed that the most persuasive arguments failed to induce him to consent to any change or embellishment in the dilapidated building. On such occasions, recollection often occurred to me of that chamber, where, according to the gardener’s report, Adelaide’s bridegroom had suffered from the agency of some mysterious power. No one had been able to communicate to me any additional particulars on the subject. But at this period an unexpected occurrence brought it more under my view.

The Seven Years’ War at that time was frequently the cause of our receiving military guests. Two young officers were quartered in the castle; who were the more welcome as they were acquaintances of the Baron’s son, and could give much welcome information with regard to him. One evening, while they were present, the conversation chanced to turn on ghosts. Some of the assembled persons asserted, and others denied their existence, as is usually the case in such discussions. No one had ever actually seen a spectre; and all agreed in the wish to be ocularly convinced of the existence of supernatural beings. The younger of the officers at last mentioned having heard of a Silver Lady who haunted the castle; and asked the Baron whether she had ever appeared to him.

My curiosity was instantly intensely excited; but the Baron evaded the question, and related many anecdotes of apparitions which had always been eventually explained as deceptions, occasioned either by accident or by fear. The Baron, as it

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Rh of baleful and significant shape were repeatedly observed. Learned men of every school sent in elaborate addresses to the Throne, in which they attempted to account for these strange manifestations. But they were obliged to confess that many of the reported happenings were unique, and of a very baffling character. While speculation thus reigned on every side, Genji held in his heart a guilty secret which might well be the key to these distressing portents.

Lady Fujitsubo had fallen ill at the beginning of the year and since the third month her malady had taken a serious turn. The August visit of the Emperor to her bedside and other unusual ceremonies had already taken place. He was a mere child when she relinquished the care of him, and he had grown up without any very strong feelings towards her. But he now looked so solemn as he stood by the bedside that she herself began to feel quite sad. ‘I have for some while felt certain,’ she said to him calmly, ‘that this would be the last year of my life. But as long as my illness did not prevent me from going about as usual, I gave no hint to those around me that I knew my end was near; for I dreaded the fuss and outcry that such a confession would have produced. Nor did I alter in any way my daily prayers and observances. I longed to visit you at the Palace and talk with you quietly about old days. But I seldom felt equal to so great an exertion…. And now it is too late.’

She spoke in a very low, feeble voice. She was thirty-seven years old, but seemed much younger. The Emperor, as he looked at her, was overwhelmed by pity and regret. That just as she was reaching an age when she would need

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 seemed to me, was studiously and designedly pursuing this theme, when the officer, who was slightly inebriated, suddenly demanded, with all the reckless audacity of wine—

“Whether the circumstances that had happened to the General were also a deception?”

Bentheim became visibly embarrassed, and could not deny that the occurrence was quite inexplicable to him.

“Though,” continued he, “it is useless for us to attempt the solution of this mystery. To me, at least, the general never related the events of that night, and I see,” added he, with a feeble smile, and a painfully visible effort at jocularity, “no necessity for attributing them to a ghost.”

Both officers now insisted on examining the mysterious chamber themselves; the opposition of the Baron and the agitation of Adelaide only serving to inflame their curiosity.”

“We are resolved,” said they, “to pass the night in that room. How do we know that our visit may not be productive of some startling incidents like those which we find in comedies and romances?”

I offered to share their nocturnal watch, saying, that I had often heard similar adventures could only be successfully accomplished by three persons. They gladly agreed to my proposal, and Bentheim, also, at last consented. He whispered some words to his daughter; and a few minutes afterwards he desired her to cause the chamber of the Silver Lady to be prepared for their guests.

In a short time, the two officers and I, rising from table, and eager to encounter the mysterious adventure we anticipated, bade farewell to our host and his lovely daughter; and proceeded to the eventful apartment, which we found prepared for our reception.

Our arms lay on a table; numerous candles lighted every part of the room; some sofas, in case we should be fatigued,

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 were spread with mattresses and coverlets; and in a niche in the wall there stood a bed. In the centre of the room, there was a round table, on which were placed wine and spirits, and a speaking trumpet and a large bell enabled us to alarm the house, if necessary.

We closely examined all the arrangements, lighted up every corner, and carefully inspected the windows and doors. We then seated ourselves at the round table, animating our courage by bumpers of wine, and agreeing on the different parts we were to act in the expected nocturnal drama.

Midnight approached, and every thing remained as still as death. Our conversation was exhausted; our eyelids began to droop; in vain we reminded each other of the necessity of watchfulness—sleep maintained its rights.

A loud and repeated knocking roused us. We sprang from our seats, and for a moment gazed on each other in speechless consternation. The lights burned dimly: but another glance revealed to us the bright rays of day streaming through the crevices in the shutters. The next moment, however, determined our doubts; a servant entered, and asked us whether we wished to breakfast alone, or with the family?

Somewhat disappointed at the failure of our expectations, and not very certain whether we had missed the adventure, or the adventure had missed us, we gave the necessary answer, and shortly afterwards quitted the scene of our defeat. We expected to be received with sportive mockery, and to hear many satirical observations on our prowess. But the Baron merely asked whether we had been disturbed during the night; and on our candidly confessing that we had slept soundly through the whole of it, he drily remarked, that we should have shown more wisdom if we had suppressed our idle curiosity altogether.

Both the strangers now began to show their wit at the ex-

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50 his care, she should, unknown to him, have passed through months of continual suffering, without once having recourse to those sacred expedients which alone might have saved her—this thought made the most painful impression upon him; and now, in a last attempt to rescue her from death, he set in motion every conceivable sort of ritual and spell. Genji too was dismayed at the discovery that for months past she had been worn out by constant pain, and now sought desperately to find some remedy for her condition. But it was apparent that the end was at hand; the Emperor’s visits became more and more frequent and many affecting scenes were witnessed. Fujitsubo was in great pain and seldom attempted to speak at any length. But lying there and looking back over the whole course of her career, she thought that while in the outward circumstances of life few women could have been more fortunate than herself, inwardly scarce one in all history had been more continually apprehensive and wretched. The young Emperor was of course still wholly ignorant of the secret of his birth. In not acquainting him with it she felt that she had failed in the discharge of an essential duty, and the one matter after her death in which she felt any interest was the repair of this omission.

Merely in his position as head of the government it was natural that Genji should be gravely concerned by the approaching loss to his faction of so distinguished a supporter, coming, as it seemed likely to, not many months after the death of the old Grand Minister. This public concern could indeed be openly displayed. But concealed from all those about him there was in his inmost heart a measureless sorrow, to which he dared give vent only in perpetual supplication and prayer. That it was no longer possible to renew even such casual and colourless intercourse as had been theirs in recent years was very painful to him.

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 pense of ghosts and ghost seers. The Baron listened patiently for some time; and, at last, asked, with seeming carelessness, whether they were inclined to encounter another night of danger? The officers quickly answered in the affirmative, and appeared rather offended by the question. But Bentheim continued, very composedly,

“You have spoken: and I shall now acquaint you with a deception which has been practised on you. When, yesterday, you expressed a wish to pass the night in the suspicious chamber, I thought your design a mere ebullition of youthful levity, and I consequently opposed it. You urged me still more; and then, I seemed to accede. But still desiring to protect you from the results which might have proceeded from a compliance with your desire, I resorted to a stratagem. You believe that you have tempted fate and tried your courage, in the haunted chamber; but you have only occupied one of the common rooms of the castle, in which no extraordinary event was likely to occur. Perhaps this is the reason why you have remained undisturbed. Since yesterday, however, I imagine I have become better acquainted with your disposition; and I now think that I owe you a reparation for the deceit which I have practised upon you. If, therefore, your courage is not damped by your first trial, I now faithfully promise you, you shall certainly pass the coming night in The Silver Lady’s chamber. Consider well, however, whether your intrepidity is equal to the adventure; and then let me know your resolution. I must also mention, that whatever may befal you, no practical jest shall be attempted against you, either by myself, or by any of my family. I pledge you, I repeat, my word of honour, that no one shall presume, by any deception, to alarm or to disturb you.”

This speech made a visible impression on the strangers. The serious tone of the Baron showed that, in his estimation

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 at least, there really was some peril in this undertaking; and their imagination had free course to wander in the most fearful regions of the world of spirits. But as they could not refuse the Baron’s proposal without declaring their previous boldness to be mere idle boasting, they reasserted their willingness to risk the adventure.

“I expected this firmness from you,” said Bentheim; “but do not imagine your enterprise to be unimportant. I fear that you may this night be compelled to encounter sights which pass human understanding. Prepare, therefore, to meet with intrepidity whatever awaits you. I repeat to you, that I know nothing myself of the appalling secrets of that room; for I, as well as my parents, were solemnly enjoined by our ancestors, never to enter it; and the General, as you are already aware, never revealed to any one what he saw within it.”

Much conversation followed; but nothing tending to throw any light on the affair.

At supper, the Baron was unusually gloomy and taciturn. He drank no wine himself; and advised us to be equally abstinent, or at least to postpone our indulgence in it until the time for our vigils arrived; when, he added impressively, we might be found to need its sustaining power. Shortly afterwards, we all repaired to the celebrated chamber.

Here were evident traces of desolation; and the difference between this room and that in which we had slept the night before, was most striking.

A modern table, and three new chairs, which had been brought into the room for the three guests, formed a disagreeable contrast to the rest of the antiquated, mouldering furniture, and still further heightened the general aspect of decay. In the recess of a walled-up gothic window there stood an altar of ancient architecture, richly carved with figures of saints. There was only one other window in the room, whence nothing was

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 visible but an opposite wing of the castle, in which not even one solitary light denoted the vicinity of a living being.

In the mean time, we arranged ourselves as comfortably as possible. The flask of wine which was to inspire us with courage, was soon exhausted. We then imagined all the most horrible possibilities, in the hope of surpassing the reality; and thus prepared for the worst, we resolved to encounter any phantom or terrific object that might present itself, with composure.

Midnight now drew near—I strongly recommended that we should, in conjunction, closely examine every corner of the room; but my companions were not to be moved from their seats. I reproved their apathy to advice, which in the course of an hour might be very differently viewed by them. But in vain I insisted; for a brief time they struggled ineffectually against the dominion of sleep; at last, it completely overpowered them in spite of all my endeavours to keep them on the alert.

I was now as solitary as if alone in the mysterious chamber. The profound slumber of my companions appeared to me unnatural; and this idea increased the horror which must seize even the most intrepid mind, in such a situation, and at such a time. In vain, did I endeavour to imitate my companions, and summon unconsciousness to my aid. My excited imagination drove me from my seat, and I wandered restlessly through the room. How often did I then execrate the idle curiosity which had led me to investigate the mysteries of this fearful chamber. The slightest creaking in the mouldering, worm-eaten furniture, startled me as announcing the near approach of some terrific phantom; and at such moments, I could scarcely refrain from rushing from the room to seek refuge and protection in the inhabited parts of the castle.

And why, it may be asked, did I not now put into practice the advice which I had given my companions, and minutely

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Paragraph 1, lines 10–11: "watering-/pan" rendered as "watering-pan", despite "watering/pan" on p. 161. -- Yodin T 04:40, 31 December 2023 (UTC)


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Authors
-- Yodin T 05:30, 31 December 2023 (UTC)
 * "Mina" by George Chambers

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 search the apartment? I know not; unless terror was the cause. I feared to look, to move, almost to breathe, for it seemed to my enervated mind as though the slightest motion might conjure into existence some loathsome vision. A faint, glimmering light, that I now, for the first time, perceived through the window in the opposite wing of the castle, which before had been perfectly dark, was somewhat consolatory to me. Its movement seemed to denote that there was one waking being besides myself in the vicinity of this fearful chamber; perhaps, stationed there by the Baron, through anxiety for ourselves.

While I was rejoicing in my reanimated courage, I suddenly heard a low, but distinct knocking at the door! A slight shudder, which, however, I soon suppressed, prevented me from immediately admitting my nocturnal visitor; and the knocking was repeated more loudly. I took a pistol under my arm; and, with a light in my hand, I approached the well bolted door. In the meantime, I heard behind me, a low call; and turning round, a female figure met my eyes, in the act of entering the room, by a concealed door in the tapestry. She wore a veil curiously embroidered with silver stars; and her height and appearance strikingly reminded me of the figure I had seen in my dream. For a moment, I gazed upon her in doubt, amazement, and awe; but soon she re-assured me by removing its covering from her face; and—and Adelaide stood before me! The surprise which I experienced was about to escape in an ejaculation; but she put her finger on her lips, as a sign for silence.

The mystery of the chamber was now disclosed to me. Adelaide was a somnambulist. My terror of the world of spirits now yielded to one quite as agitating, which destroyed the happiness, which the presence of the beloved of my heart must otherwise have occasioned me. How probable was it that my companions might awake, and what embarrassments and

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