That day, alone with the mountains and with God, was one to leave its impress forever upon life. It was a day of solutions as well as of impressions—of solutions of the problem of living. One has but to follow the path that God has revealed to him, and however insurmountable the difficulties that seem to hedge him in and to limit his progress, they vanish as they are drawn near, and a way is revealed.

To forsake a dream as being impracticable and impossible of realization is to take the wrong turning in life, like one who leaves the mountain road,—which winds in and out of the passes, on and on, and leads to a definite place at last,—and, because he sees an apparently impassable mountain wall across the path, forsakes this and wanders off into some other valley and defile that looks more open, but in whose mazes he loses himself and makes no progress toward his true destination.

No,—when the vision shines suddenly upon one's life, it is God's call to him to realize in it outward expression. The difficulties that hedge it round about will vanish as he approaches them. A dream is given to be realized. It is the working model that God sends into one's life for that full expression which alone is at once his best service and truest success. It is the common daily work of fulfilling duties add meeting claims. "Not by the exceptional," says Maeterlinck, "shall the last word ever be spoken; and, indeed, what we call the sublime should be only a clearer, profounder insight into all that is perfectly normal." It is of service, often, to watch those on the peaks who do battle; but it is well, too, not to forget those in the valley below who fight not at all. As we see all that happens to these whose life knows no struggle; as we realize how much must be conquered in us before we can rightly distinguish their narrower joys from the joy known to them who are striving on high, then, perhaps does the struggle itself appear to become less important; but, for all that, we love it the more. This normal fulfilment of the due claims of ordinary life leads to that order of success which is a beautiful and desirable one, and which is almost a universal aim and purpose. Aspirations and energy are its factors, and these are of all various and varying degrees of excellence according to the specific aim in view. Success itself, therefore, is merely a representative term, and may be used regarding almost every variety of achievement, from the triumphant winning of a game of football, the making of a great fortune, the attainment of professional or political rank, the production of great art, the acquirement of world-wide fame, or the achievement of character that is potent for fine and ennobling influence. All these are typical of myriad forms of the thing the world calls success, and while it involves a vast amount of competition, of selfishness, of greed, of injustice, it is yet a matter of the progress of humanity that each individual should strive after the highest form of attainment that he is capable of conceiving. In the long run, and as a general principle, this is advantageous and desirable. It involves and indeed develops many of the lower and baser qualities; but these are the tares among the wheat, and the wheat is essential. The great enterprise that builds a railway across the continent, tunneling under mountains, or climbing the precipitous inclines; that inaugurates a new steamer line, or that exerts itself for the founding of institutions for culture or technical instruction; that concerns itself with municipal reforms and improvements,—all these expressions of energy are manifestations of successful effort, and are necessary to the onward march of civilization. Yet the visible achievement is not, after all, the realization of the highest ideal of success.

The conditions of success may best be approached by a clearly defined idea of what success itself means, what it stands for to us, what proportion of our real life it represents. Success is the watchword of American life—one might almost, indeed, say that it is made the test of our national life to a far greater degree than in any other country. The elements are well defined in Emerson's phrase of "the flowing conditions of life." They are, indeed, more than merely plastic and malleable; they are fluid, flowing, and the constant advance into higher states of life is precisely in proportion to the mental and moral force of the individual brought to bear upon them. Even this assertion, however, is to hold in the light of the true conception of success itself. We see a man whose life is conspicuously that of mental and moral force, working faithfully and ably day by day, year by year, and yet never being free from certain financial anxieties, if not financial needs; while his neighbor, who is neither very learned nor able, nor yet in any wise remarkable in his moral development, is living much after the fashion of Midas, whose touch turned everything to gold. But is gold the test of success?

The panorama of life is a complicated one. It used to be the fashion of the novelists to represent the world of riches and fashion as the world devoid of sympathy and love, and often, indeed, as devoid even of moral principle; while the world of poverty and toil was held up as composed of men and women whose lives were all unselfishness and sacrifice, and as those who truly followed the example of Him who was meek and lowly of heart. But the panorama of actual life reveals no such sharply defined divisions as that. Virtue and vice are not checked off into special and separate regions; wealth has its greatness of mind and beneficence of sympathy and love, and poverty has its selfishness and cruelty and injustice. Other things being equal, the command of unlimited means may be so used as to make it one of the great blessings of life, and this fact is attended and illustrated by such an increasing array of evidence as to make the statement merely the trite one of every-day fact. Again, that prominence in affairs that we call position is good if rightly used, and to an increasing degree it is so used. Noblesse oblige is the watchword of modern life.

"Success in thyself, which is best of all."

That line from a poem of Emerson's most clearly defines true success. The "power of conduct, the power of intellect and knowledge, the power of beauty, and the power of social life and manners,"—to achieve such power as is thus enumerated by Matthew Arnold, and adding to it that which is greater than all, and that without which all else is useless and unvitalized, the power of the Divine energy received through prayer,—these are the powers and achievements that tend to the true and only success,—the success of character.

New conceptions of the old watchwords of life are in the air. In "Culture" President Eliot of Harvard sees new points of view; he finds a new definition of the cultivated man, who is not, in this Twentieth-Century reading of the term, to be "a weak, critical, fastidious creature, vain of a little exclusive information or of an uncommon knack in Latin verse or mathematical logic; he is to be a man of quick perceptions, broad sympathies, and wide affinities, responsive but independent, self-reliant but deferential, loving truth and candor, but also moderation and proportion, courageous but gentle, not finished but perfecting."

"The situation that has not its ideal was never yet occupied by man," well said Goethe; and perhaps one of the greatest aids to both achievement and happiness would be to recognize this ideal as the standard placed before one, the model after which he is to fashion his life, because he is, now and here, in the Divine Presence, because now and here he "stands before God." Nor is this too sublime a test for the trivialities of every day. As a matter of truth, nothing is trivial that has to do with the life of the spirit. The petty irritations, impatience, vexations, and disappointments of life are things that affect one's spiritual quality, that make or mar his higher self, that accelerate or retard his progress in the upward way, according as these feelings are allowed to take control or are resolutely conquered. The occurrences that excite them are, to the life of the spirit, like the "gifts" in a kindergarten,—they are the object lessons by means of which growth and progress are attained. Now, if one can conceive of his life, every day, every hour, as lived in the very presence of the Divine; if he can realize himself at all times as "standing before God," how this recognition transforms all the conditions and circumstances! The drama of living is instantly lifted up to a higher plane. That which was hard becomes easy; that which was sad, or dull, or unattractive, becomes invested with interest. One is living, not unto himself, but unto God. He is living within that marvellous, all-enfolding charm and radiance. He is an actor in the great spiritual drama, and he feels the stimulus of playing his part nobly and well.

And they who have gone behind the curtain come forth and minister to him. He is aware of the courage of companionship.

"'Mortal,' they softly say,
'Peace to thy heart.
We, too, yes, mortal,
Have been as thou art.'"

Voices unheard by the outer ear speak to the soul; presences unseen by the eye are yet felt, giving their sympathy and stimulus.

It is good to remember that it is not only after death that the soul stands before God; that here and now is the heavenly test to which life must be held amenable; here and now must one make his thought and his acts those that know only the ideals of love and generosity and sweetness and courage. One may thus call up all his higher forces to meet misunderstandings with patience and with love: to meet adverse fortune with courage and with stronger and more intense endeavor; to live above the tide of jar or fret so as to dwell in perpetual radiance and sunshine of spirit. This is to "stand before God" here and now, through the days and the experiences of the life that is, as well as to anticipate standing before His Presence in that which is to come.

The ideal that reveals itself in a sudden vision of the higher harmonies and achievements possible to human life is but another name for the Opportunity which Shakespeare defines,—the opportunity that, if one fail to accept it, vanishes, to leave all the remainder of life "bound in shallows and in miseries."

There is something about hesitation and reconsiderations that is curiously fatal to successful achievement. Good fortune is in going on,—not in going back. The parable of Lot's wife, who turned into a pillar of salt because she looked back, is by no means inapplicable to the life of to-day. Let one on whom the vision has shone look backward instead of forward and he becomes paralyzed and immovable. He has invoked inimical influences. He is impeded by the shallows and the miseries. He has withdrawn himself from all the heavenly forces that lead him on. The fidelity to the vision is the vital motor. It gives that exhilaration of energy which makes possible the impossible.

"The Americans have many virtues," said Emerson, "but they have not Faith and Hope. I know no two words whose meaning is more lost sight of. We use these words as if they were as obsolete as Selah. And yet they have the broadest meaning and the most cogent application. The opening of the spiritual senses," continues Emerson, "disposes men even to greater sacrifices, to leave their signal talents, their means and skill of procuring a present success, their power and their fame,—to cast all things behind in the insatiable thirst for divine communications. A purer fame, a greater power, rewards the sacrifice."

Each recurring New Year is an open door. However arbitrary are the divisions of Time, there is inspiration and exaltation in standing on the threshold of an untried year, with its fresh pages awaiting record. It is, again, the era of possibilities. The imaginative faculty of the soul must, indeed, be "fed with objects immense and eternal." Life stretches before one in its diviner unity,—even in the wholeness of the life that is and that which is to come. There is not one set of motives and purposes to be applied to this life, and another set to that which awaits us. This is the spiritual world, here and now, and it is the business of man to live divinely in it; to be responsive to the enthusiasms that enchant his thought; to be faithful to the vision that beckons him on. It is well to drop the old that one may seize the new. Progress lies in a successive series of new conditions. Let one give all and ask for nothing,—let him yield himself wholly to the overpowering enthusiasm; let him not look backward from his vision of the Morning Star and the Promised Land, and thus shall the New Year fulfil itself in ever widening glory and that enchanting loveliness which invests the higher fulfilments of life.

"To work, to help and to be helped, to learn sympathy through suffering, to learn faith by perplexity, to reach truth through wonder,—behold! this is what it is to prosper, this is what it is to live," said Phillips Brooks. When Herbert Spencer produced his great "Data of Ethics" he did not consider in it the ethics of interruptions which sometimes assume a formidable place in the strenuous life. One is perhaps exceptionally patient and tolerant when it is a question of great trial or calamity, and not infrequently very impatient with the trifling annoyances and demands and interruptions that occur. Yet, is there not just here a richness of opportunity in the aim to "do good to all men" that may often be unrecognized? A writer who may be pressed for time finds in his mail-matter a number of personal requests from strangers. One package contains manuscripts, perhaps, which a woman in Montana entreats shall be read and returned with advice or suggestion. Some one in Texas wants a paragraph copied that he may use it in compiling a calendar. An individual in Indiana has a collection of autographs for sale and begs to know of the ways and means for disposing of them. And an author in Arizona desires that a possible publisher be secured for her novel; and so the requests run on. Strictly speaking, perhaps, no one of these has any real right to thus tax the time and energy of a stranger; but is there not another side to it? Here are an array of interruptions, but why not give them another name—that of opportunities? One has, perhaps, his theories and his convictions regarding the service of humanity. He holds it to be a duty,—a privilege. He believes that it is through entering into this service that he may even co-operate with God in the onward progress. To "help humanity" is a very attractive and high-sounding term. But what is humanity? Is it not, after all, composed of individuals? And here are individuals to be helped; here they are, with their several individual requests, and the injunction of the apostle suggests itself, "As ye have therefore opportunity, ... do good unto all men." Do not the interruptions assume a new form, and are they not, thereby, transfigured into glad and golden opportunity?

And it is the will of God,—that great, resistless, and unceasing force, working underneath all our human wills—it is the will of God manifesting itself in small things as well as in those that seem outwardly more important, that has grouped all these special things together and sent them on an especially busy morning. Shall not one rejoice and recognize that the need of another is brought as a privilege to himself? The blessedness of giving is not limited to cheques and bank-bills. There are gifts that far transcend these,—gifts of patience, sympathy, thought, and counsel, and (such is the blessedness of the Divine Law) these are gifts that the poorest can give. The need on the one side may be the luxury on the other, for it invites sympathetic comprehension and the enlargement of friendly relations. And as for one's time,—even in a full and busy life,—it is not so much time that one requires as it is right conditions. An hour will do the work of a day, when the conditions are harmonious; and nothing so increases the degree of spiritual energy as the glow and ardor and joy of doing some little service for another. In this lies the real blessedness, the real luxury of life, and one reads the profound significance in the words of Maeterlinck: "It is well to believe that there needs but a little more courage, more love, more devotion to life, a little more eagerness, one day to fling open wide the portals of joy and truth." These qualities redeem the temporal to the immortal, for immortality is a condition of the soul, not a definite period in time. The soul, now and here, may put on immortality. Life is, after all, an affair of the immortal self, and it is the invisible powers which are its stay, its guide, and its inspiration. We live and move and have our being on the divine side of things. We only live—in any true sense—as we are filled with the heavenly magnetism. "Thou hast made known to me the ways of life; thou shalt make me full of joy with thy countenance," says the apostle. Here is the true gospel to live by. There are "ways of life;" even through toil and trial they shall be reached. The one is eternal, the other temporal. It is unwise to lay too much stress on the infelicities of the moment. Exaltation alone is real; depression is unreal. The obstacle before one is not intended to stop progress, but to stimulate new energies to the overcoming.

Among the "devastators of a day" there is encountered, however, a vast army of persons who advertise themselves vociferously as being wonder-workers of human life. According to their insistent proclamations, poverty is a "disease," and is to be cured by a course of correspondence lessons; beauty, address, gifts and graces and power, are secrets of which they hold the key; even death, too, is but another mental malady and is easily to be overcome by their recipes. All these fraudulent representations—as absurd as they are false—are but the gross distortion of the underlying truth that thought creates conditions and controls results. Thought cannot transform poverty into wealth by means of six lessons; but the right quality of thought can set in motion the causes which, carried on to fulfilment, result in an increasing prosperity and welfare. One may thus achieve the top of his condition through serenity and poise of spirit, and thus be enabled to see events and combinations in their true perspective. He is not overwhelmed and swept into abysses of despair because some momentary disaster has occurred, but he regards it in its relative significance to the general trend of matters, and thus remains master of the situation.

Still, if there are spurious claims to the power of the magician, and if these claims, paraded by the idle, invade disastrously the realms of the industrious in a continual procession of interruptions, there is something, too, to be said on the side of another—and a very genuine sort of wonder-working,—to transmute these interruptions into opportunities.

Individuality is the incalculable factor in life, and it is one, too, that must be fully allowed for, if one would proceed as harmoniously as possible among the unseen brambles and pitfalls that may beset his onward pathway. A very large proportion of the discords of life arise from the failure to take into consideration the special qualities in their special grouping that determine the person with whom one has to do,—qualities which are, practically, unalterable, and must simply be accepted and borne with as best one may. There is the person, for instance, who is always and invariably behind time in every movement of his life. He leaves undone the things that ought to be done, until there is little use in doing them at all. He exhausts the patience and excites the irritability of his friend, who is, by nature, prompt and always up with the hour. There is the person who, from some latent cause in his character, always manages badly; who reduces all his own affairs to confusion; who contrives to waste more money, time, and energy than industry and energy can produce; whose normal condition is a crisis of disaster, and who, if extricated from this seventy times seven, will contrive to fall into it again. All these, and a thousand variations on characters of this type, we see around us, or within ourselves, constantly, and a liberal proportion of the trial or discord incident to family life, or to friendship and companionship, is simply in constantly demanding of another that which he cannot give, which he does not possess. To ask of the habitual procrastinator that he shall be prompt; or of the defective manager that he shall keep his affairs in order and make the most and the best out of his possessions, is totally useless. In the evolutionary progress of life, he will probably, sometime and somewhere, learn wisdom and do better; but habit and temperament are not liable to meet a sea change into something new and strange all in the flash of a moment, and it is worse than useless to demand this, or to be irritated, or impatient, or even too sorrowful, because of this fact. There are things that cannot be cured,—at least, not immediately. Therefore they must be endured. When one once makes up his mind to the acceptance of this theory it is astonishing to see how it simplifies the problem. The philosophy is merely to do one's own part, but not to make any superhuman effort to do the other person's part also. Let it go. There is no use in making a casus belli of the matter. Nothing is ever helped by irritation over it,—even the irritation of generosity and love, which seeks only the good of the other.

There is, for instance, the procrastinating correspondent. You write, and you want a reply, and you want it straightway. On your own part you would make it with the promptness and despatch of the United States mail itself, but your correspondent is not constructed after the fashion of a galvanic battery, and although he means to respond at once, he doesn't. He has not the temperamental apparatus that works in that way. He has, perhaps, a thousand qualities that are better, finer, more important, but he does not happen to have that particular one. What then? Shall you make his life and your own a burden with complaint and reproach? By no means. Let it pass. It is a part of his individuality, and cannot—at the moment, at least—be altered. This one must frankly accept as the defect of his friend. But recognizing the defect need not blind one to the thousand virtues that his friend possesses.

In fact, as we have each and all our individual sins, negligences, and weaknesses, we may well limit our zeal for reform to our own needs, at least until we have achieved such perfection that we are entitled to require perfection on the part of our associates.

To the orderly, thrifty type of New England temperament nothing is more incompatible with sympathy than the bad management of the person not endowed with "faculty," as Mrs. Stowe well expresses it. And it must be conceded that a lack of the power essential to dominate the general affairs of life and keep them in due subordination and order, is an unmistakable draft on the affections. It is a problem as to just how far aid and sympathy do any good, and not infrequently the greater the real care and affection, the greater, too, is the irritation and the annoyance. But even the annoyance born of tender interest and love, it is better not to feel too keenly. Let one do what he can,—do all that is reasonable and right to assist in counterbalancing the ills that arise from defective management, and then let it pass, and not take it into his mind as a source of constant anxiety. We have all our lessons to learn, and every failure brings its own discipline as the inevitable result. "Regret calamities if you can thereby help the sufferer," as Emerson so well says; "if not, attend to your own work, and already the evil begins to be repaired."

Of society, in the true sense, social life offers comparatively little. In the midst of ceremonial assembling one is starved for companionship. One may live in the very heart of what is held to be a brilliant social season and be as unutterably lonely as if in a desert solitude. Indeed, the latter offers compensations which the former denies. There is a great deal of companionship, however unrecognized, in the cloud of witnesses that encompass us round about, and whose presence is less vividly felt in the gleam and glitter of ceremonial society. The more general assemblages of clubs, teas, and receptions are so incorporated into the social system that no one could cancel these if he would, nor would he if he could. They have their uses. All exchange of human sympathies is good, even if it be somewhat superficial and spectacular. The more exclusive dinners are not without their special charm as occasions when conversation becomes possible on a less unsatisfactory scale than the exchange of inanities in crowded receptions. Yet, with due recognition of the stimulus and the brilliancy that may flash from a select group of people, the deeper truth remains that it is only in a more personal companionship that is found the supreme luxury of life, and that companionship is a relation existing solely between two, refusing its spell when that number is increased.

Nothing is less considered by society than companionship. It is considered an unheard-of waste of time to devote an entire evening to one guest, when, indeed, five, ten, or fifty might be warmed, lighted, and fed in the same time. The fashionable hostess invites her friends to pay off her social debts. If she can pay off fifty or five hundred—in the time that she would give to one, she felicitates herself on her clever management. The idea of inviting her friends because she really wishes to talk with them would bewilder her. She does not converse; she "receives." She arrays herself in her smartest gown, and her social interchange with each guest consists in a graceful greeting and a no less graceful adieu, followed by an epoch of private gratitude that the required entertainment is over. She consults her visiting list and conscientiously arranges for her next reception, or dinner, or dance, in the fulfilment of what she is pleased to call her social duties. And all this, however superficial or spectacular it may be, has its place, and serves, with more or less success, to promote social meeting, preliminary acquaintance, out of which the choicest friendships sometimes spring. But it is quite possible to concede that certain formalities and ceremonial observances have their legitimate place without conceding that they monopolize the resources of social enjoyment. When one comes to that—it is quite another matter.

The supreme gift and grace and enchantment of life is in sympathetic companionship. And this, in its truer sense, is a relation of spirit, an elective affinity, rather than a mere concurrence of intellectual or artistic tastes. It is quite possible for two persons to like Sargent's pictures, or to draw the line at the inane "society" play without, after all, finding themselves in any relations of especial sympathy. "Only that soul can be my friend," said Emerson, "which I encounter on the line of my own march; that soul to which I do not decline, and which does not decline to me, but, native of the same celestial latitude, repeats in its own all my experience." Margaret Fuller defined this sympathy as that of beings born under the same star. But phrases are of little worth,—the experience eludes all definitions and defies all phrasings. It exists by divine right, or it does not exist at all. It is a law unto itself. It is a recognition that has to do with the inward springs of thought and action.

Companionship is the inflorescence of social life,—its finest result, its most exquisite and perfect ideal. But it requires a certain degree of fitness. It requires the choice organization, the nobler and the finer degree of spiritual development. The crude person can pass well enough in a social assemblage, but only the choicer individuality is fit for that finer and more subtle relation of companionship.

Yet this highest realization of social enjoyment is, for the most part, relegated to shreds and patches of time. The mornings must be given to lectures, readings, receptions, clubs, and teas; the evenings must be devoted to dinners, dances, opera, concerts, plays, or musicales. For communion of friend with friend, spirit with spirit, there is no time. The crowning joy of life, in its possibilities for sympathetic companionship, is ignored. For companionship is a spiritual joy, and society recognizes only the spectacular pleasures. The finer order of social life for which the world were well lost, awaits its evolution.

"The life a man lives and the life he ought to live belong together. The real and the ideal lie side by side in the thought of God."

The distractions of life are every day's tragedy. The mutilation of purpose, the disintegration of time, the neutralization of all endeavor, which result from the perpetual occurrence of the unforeseen, cannot but prefigure itself as a theme for meditation to the worker who looks back on a day, a week, a month, an entire season, in which "the flighty purpose" has never been overtaken. The calendar has the inexorableness of fate. The day, the month, goes by, unrelenting. It may be shattered with feeble and inexpressive demands, but all the same it is gone, and it is unreturning. Whether freighted richly with the essential, or merely burdened with the ineffectual, it is equally irretrievable.

This involves a problem of life full of spiritual perplexity. Certainly, no man liveth to himself, or, if he does, his living is a selfish and worthless thing. Certainly a man is his brother's keeper—to a degree. The poet whose dream is about to crystallize in verse is assured that life is more than art, and that to sustain the spirits of the depressed caller who appears at that precise instant, with the unfailing instinct with which the depressed do invariably appear at a literary crisis,—he is assured that this act is a "nobler poem" than any he could write. And such is the tremendous impression that the gospel in the air of the service of humanity makes on us all, that he dare not disregard this possibility. He is not absolutely sure, it is true, that he is "serving humanity" in this individual instance, but he is not at all sure that it is not true; and he reflects that other days are coming, when, perhaps, by some divine dispensation, the depressed caller will not appear! But there are no days on which he, or his prototype, is not on hand, and so the problem ever remains a present, an immediate, and, alas! an insoluble one. For this is an age when the depressed, who have nothing to do, require, to sustain their drooping spirits, the sympathetic ministrations of those who are too busy to indulge in the languid luxury of gentle and romantic sadness. In fact, they feel a certain inalienable right to demand that current of sympathetic interest which otherwise would express itself in the specific work in which one is engaged. "You desire to 'serve humanity,' do you?" the depressed caller says, virtually, as he fixes the mere worker with his glittering eye. "Well, I am Humanity. What is a book compared to a human soul? Here, before you, in living personality, is a need. Can you forsake it for abstract literature?"

If the unfortunate worker has any species of the New England conscience he is at a disadvantage. He has nothing to say for himself. There are behind him more than two centuries of his ancestors who have preached and practiced self-sacrifice, generosity, love. In one sense he is even enfeebled by his ethical nature. It possesses him, rather than enables him to clearly and consciously possess it. He feels a certain magnetic attraction to the fulfilment of a definite purpose; but after all, the world is full of purposes and of far greater and abler persons than himself to carry them on; and perhaps this particular appeal is from one of those "little ones" whom the Christ he holds in reverence bids him care for first of all. Perhaps the immediate human need should take precedence over specific work. Perhaps it is a real human need. "Treat the people as if they were real," said Emerson; "perhaps they are so." And so he becomes the victim rather than the master of his own diviner life. He sees through a glass darkly. He is not in the least sure that he can do any good, but he is fearful he may do evil. And so he espouses what is really a negative side; a side of blind chance; a mere spiritual gambling, so to speak, and throws his stakes on the side of what may be useful, as he cannot prove to himself that it is not, and his life becomes a poor, mean, weak, ineffectual thing. He recalls Sir Hugo's counsel to Daniel Deronda: "Be courteous, be obliging, Dan; but don't give yourself over to be melted down for the tallow trade." He becomes sadly conscious that his entire time, purpose, energies are being simply, with his own dull consent, "melted down for the tallow trade," and that he himself is by way of being on a far more perilous margin than that of any one of the gently depressed spirits who devastate his days, and command him to create for them,—not energy, purpose, will,—but, instead, external conditions in which they may more luxuriously enjoy their romantic languor and their comforting consciousness of superior qualities.

Now is it not more than an open question that when temptation assumes the masque of "service," it is no less temptation, and that it is evil disguised as good? The woman who reads the infinitely uplifting sermons of Rev. Doctor Charles G. Ames; who solaces what she is pleased to call her soul in that marvelously great work, "The Expansion of Religion," by Rev. Doctor E. Winchester Donald; who is excited—and mistakes it for being aroused—by Rev. Doctor Philip Moxom's noble book called "The Religion of Hope;" or who entertains similar emotions over recent new and great and uplifting books by Rev. Doctor George A. Gordon or Rev. Doctor Lyman Abbott, or many another, often evolves the pleasing fantasy that all she requires for producing the same quality of work is the illumination of personal interviews or personal correspondence with them. "Surely," she reasons, "these men are servants of the Lord, and I am one of the least of these whose needs they are divinely commanded to serve. Is not the life more than meat? Should not the minister break off his morning meditation—an abstract thing, at best—to see me, who needs an immediate infusion of encouragement?"

And the tragedy of this is that the worker, who is true to his own purpose,—through good report or through ill report,—to the duties he is divinely commissioned to perform, is not infrequently entirely misunderstood. The woman who sends him a voluminous manuscript, accompanying pretty phrasings regarding his work, and modestly requesting that he shall read it, give his "views" on it, and decide just what editor or publisher will be rejoiced to issue it,—and who receives her pages of outpouring back by return mail with a note, however courteous, expressing his inability to fulfil this commission,—this woman becomes, as a rule, the enemy of the person who declines to be "melted down for the tallow trade." She may do no particular harm, but the antagonism is there. This, however, could be borne; but the nature sensitive to shades of human need is always liable to torture itself because of any failure to meet a specific demand. And this torture is disintegrating to that force of positive energy which a special work requires.

Is there not, then, a need for the gospel of one's own endeavor? that a given line of work, plainly revealed in hours of mystic communion with the Divine, indicated by the subtle trend of circumstance and condition,—is there not a need of realizing so clearly that it is the duty apportioned to the one fitted for it, that it shall inspire fidelity and reverence,—even at the risk of what the unthinking may describe as selfish absorption? For there are vast varieties of ministering for ministering spirits. The work of the social settlement is divine; but the poet and the painter, if they produce poems and paintings, cannot devote their time to its work. And the poems and the pictures have their value, as well as service in giving food and clothing to those in need. The special gift does require special conditions, and it is not selfish to insist on those conditions, when the special work is held as unto the Lord. It often requires more heroism, more faith, more love to deny than to accede to a given request. To yield is often easy; to be steadfast to one's own purpose, shining like a star upon the horizon, is not infrequently very difficult.

The ridge of a vast mountain-chain over two hundred miles in length split asunder in a yawning chasm eighteen miles in width and over seven thousand feet deep; one in which a thousand Niagaras would be lost; in which a cliff that, relatively to the scene, does not impress one as especially lofty, yet which exceeds in height the Eiffel Tower in Paris; and another which does not arrest special attention, yet is taller than the Washington Monument. But the splendor of apparent architectural creations arrests the eye. "Solomon's Temple," the "Temple of Vishnu," and altars, minarets, towers, pagodas, colonnades, as if designed by architectural art, lie grouped in wonderful combinations of form and color.

In the innermost depths of this colossal chasm runs the Colorado River. Descending the stupendous crags and terraces by one of the two or three "trails," the traveller at last stands upon a sandy rift confronted by nearly vertical walls many hundred feet high, at whose base a black torrent pitches in a giddying onward slide that gives him momentarily the sensation of slipping into an abyss.

"With so little labor may one come to the Colorado River in the heart of its most tremendous channel, and gaze upon a sight that heretofore has had fewer witnesses than have the wilds of Africa. Dwarfed by such prodigious mountain shores, which rise immediately from the water at an angle that would deny footing to a mountain sheep, it is not easy to estimate confidently the width and volume of the river. Choked by the stubborn granite at this point, its width is probably between two hundred and fifty and three hundred feet, its velocity fifteen miles an hour, and its volume and turmoil equal to the Whirlpool Rapids of Niagara. Its rise in time of heavy rain is rapid and appalling, for the walls shed almost instantly all the water that falls upon them. Drift is lodged in the crevices thirty feet overhead."

Descending to this ledge the tourist "can hardly credit Powell's achievement, in spite of its absolute authenticity. Never was a more magnificent self-reliance displayed than by the man who not only undertook the passage of the Colorado River, but won his way. And after viewing a fraction of the scene at close range, one cannot hold it to the discredit of three of Major Powell's companions that they abandoned the undertaking not far below this point. The fact that those who persisted got through alive is hardly more astonishing than that any should have had the hardihood to persist. For it could not have been alone the privation, the infinite toil, the unending suspense in constant menace of death that assaulted their courage; these they had looked for; it was rather the unlifted gloom of those tartarean depths, the unspeakable horrors of an endless valley of the shadow of death, in which every step was irrevocable....

"Not the most fervid pictures of a poet's fancy could transcend the glories revealed in the depths of the Cañon; inky shadows, pale gildings of lofty spires, golden splendors of sun beating full on façades of red and yellow, obscurations of distant peaks by veils of transient shower, glimpses of white towers half drowned in purple haze, suffusions of rosy light blended in reflection from a hundred tinted walls. Caught up to exalted emotional heights, the beholder becomes unmindful of fatigue. He mounts on wings. He drives the chariot of the sun."

The language is not yet invented that can suggest any adequate idea of the Grand Cañon. Nor can it be painted or photographed, or in any way pictorially reproduced in a manner to afford any suggestion, even, of its sublimity in design and its perpetual enchantment of color. One beholds the temples and towers and mosques and pagodas glowing in rose-red, sapphire blue, with emerald and amber and amethyst, all blending, and swimming, apparently, in a sea of purple, or of pearl gray mist, the colors flashing through like flame under alabaster. The sunlight changes as the day wears on, and so this play of color changes,—glowing, fading, paling, flaming. Watching these magical effects from dawn to sunset, watching the panorama of color as it deepens into mysterious shadows and spectral illusions under the moonlight, one can only say, "What hath God wrought!" To contemplate this marvellous and sublime spectacle is to come into a new perception of the Divine creation.

Formerly almost as inaccessible as the Himalayas, the Grand Cañon in Arizona can now be reached by the most luxurious methods of modern travelling. From Williams, on the Santa Fé road, a branch line of sixty miles runs over the rolling mesas to the "Bright Angel" hotel at the "Bright Angel Trail." The journey is enchanted by beautiful views of the San Francisco mountains seen through a purple haze.

The entire journey through Arizona offers one of the most unique experiences of a lifetime. Is this "The Country God Forgot"? The vast stretch of the plains offer effects as infinite as the sea. The vista includes only land and sky. The cloud forms and the atmospheric effects are singularly beautiful. As one flies on into Arizona this wonderful color effect in the air becomes more vivid. Mountains appear here and there: the journey is up a high grade, and one realizes that he is entering the altitudes.

A special feature of interest in Arizona is the town of Flagstaff, famous for the great Lowell Observatory, established there by Percival Lowell, a nephew of the noble John Lowell, who founded the Lowell Institute in Boston. Professor Percival Lowell is a man of broad and varied culture, a great traveller, who has familiarized himself with most things worth seeing in this sublunary sphere, and has only failed to explore Mars from reasons quite beyond his own control. At his own expense he has founded here an Observatory, with a telescope of great power, by means of which he is making astronomical researches of the greatest value to science. The special advantage of Arizona in astronomical study is not the altitude, but in the fact that there is the least possible vibration in the air here. Mr. Lowell's work makes Flagstaff a scientific centre of cosmopolitan importance, and scholars and great scientists from all over the world are constantly arriving in the little Arizona mountain town to visit the Observatory.

Flagstaff has no little archæological interest, also; the famous cliff dwellings of the Zuni tribe, which Frank Cushing explored and studied so deeply, are within a few miles of the town, located on the summit and sides of an extinct volcano. They now present the appearance of black holes, a few yards deep, often surrounded with loose and broken stone walls, and broken pottery abounds all over the vicinity. The most remarkable group of the cliff dwellers is to be seen in Walnut Cañon, eight miles from Flagstaff. This is one of the deep gorges, the cliffs rising several hundred feet above the valley; and they are sheer terraced walls of limestone, running for over three miles. In these terraces, in the most singularly inaccessible places, are dozens of the cliff dwellings. Some of them are divided into compartments by means of cemented walls, and they retain traces of quite a degree of civilization.

The petrified forests of Arizona are a most extraordinary spectacle, with its acres of utter desolation in its giant masses of dead trees lying prostrate on the ground. Arizona is a land of the most mysterious charm. The Grand Cañon alone is worth a pilgrimage around the world to see,—a spectacle so bewildering that words are powerless to suggest the living, changing picture. "Long may the visitor loiter upon the rim, powerless to shake loose from the charm, tirelessly intent upon the silent transformations until the sun is low in the west. Then the cañon sinks into mysterious purple shadow, the far Shinumo Altar is tipped with a golden ray, and against a leaden horizon the long line of the Echo Cliffs reflects a soft brilliance of indescribable beauty, a light that, elsewhere, surely never was on sea or land. Then darkness falls, and should there be a moon, the scene in part revives in silver light, a thousand spectral forms projected from inscrutable gloom; dreams of mountains, as in their sleep they brood on things eternal."