ous, refined, sceptical
mind, ever commit such a mistake! No, he will not fight with windmills,
he does not believe in giants ... but he would not have attacked them
even if they did exist.... And he does not believe in evil. Evil and
deceit are his inveterate enemies. His scepticism is not
indifferentism.... But in negation, as in fire, there is a destructive
power, and how to keep it in bounds, how to tell it where to stop, when
that which it must destroy, and that which it must spare are often
inseparably welded together? Here it is that the often-noticed tragical
aspect of human life comes in: for action we require will, and for
action we require thought; but thought and will have parted from each
other, and separate every day more and more....

"And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sickled o'er by the pale cast of thought...."

[Illustration]

ON THE BANKS OF ACHERON

By EDWIN BJORKMAN

The air was still and full of a gray melancholy light, yet the waters of
the river boiled angrily as if touched by a raging tempest. The billows
rose foaming above its surface, all white with the whiteness of fear.
When they sank back again, they were black--black as despair that knows
of no hope.

Steep hills mounted abruptly on either side of the river until they
touched the sullen, colorless cloud-banks overhead. Their sides were
seamed with numberless paths, running on narrow ledges, one above the
other, from the river's edge to the crest of the hill. Men were moving
along those paths: they swarmed like ants across the hillside, but I
could not see whence they were coming nor whither they were going. All
were pushing and jostling and scratching and howling and fighting. Every
one's object seemed to be to raise himself to the path above his own and
to prevent all others from doing the same.

Down at the water's edge, they moved in a solid mass, arms pinned down,
shoulder to shoulder and chest to back. At times a man got an arm out of
the press and began to claw the up-turned, tear-stained faces of his
neighbors in wild endeavors to lift his whole body. But soon his madness
subsided, the writhing arm sank back, and the man vanished out of sight.
The mass once more moved stolidly, solidly onward. Once in a great while
its surface of heads would begin to boil like the waters of the river
near by, and a man would be spouted into the air, landing on one of the
paths above. Then each face would be tur