tales that are or were a refreshment. But
others he embodied in sermons addressed to reality. He told us none
needed to go to his coast for romance, or for purity and beauty and
goodness, for we really were full of them. We were made in fact of just
these ingredients, at least in our hearts; and it followed, he said,
that our actions should be chosen accordingly. Without ever having
learned anything much of mankind, he described just the way that he felt
all mankind should behave. He put on the robes of a sage, and he
sweetened his looks, and his voice became tender and thrilling and
rather impressive; and he wrote about the Treasure of the Humble, and
Wisdom and Destiny.

The real world is not easy to live in. It is rough; it is slippery.
Without the most clear-eyed adjustments we fall and get crushed. A man
must stay sober: not always, but most of the time. Those of us who drink
from the flasks of the sages of dreamland become so intoxicated with
guff we are a peril to everyone.

We trust in Hague tribunals for instance, on the eve of great wars.

The flask that Wood-Alcohol Maurice, if I may so call him, held so long
to our lips in the years before 1914, produced the usual effects of joy
first, and then blindness and coma. I speak from experience. I took some
myself and was poisoned, and I knew other cases. But it poisoned poor
Maeterlinck more--I may say, most of all--for he had taken his own
medicine honorably as fast as he mixed it. Owing to this imprudence, he
found himself, in 1914, in such a deep coma it almost killed him to come
out of it. His anger at having to wake up and face things was loud. He
found himself compelled to live for a while in the midst of hard facts,
and his comments upon them were scathing; as all dreamers' are.

Since then he has gone part-way back to the land of romance, and if he
will stay there I shall not prefer charges against him. He is one of the
masters of fancy. He can mine fairy gold. But any time he comes to this
world we're now learning to live in, or offers us any more mail-order
lessons in sweetness, I think we should urge him to go and stay where he
belongs.

There is a poem by Joaquin Miller about Columbus that describes his long
voyage. It consists, as I remember, entirely of groans by the sailors,
who keep asking Columbus whether he will please let them turn back. But
Columbus never has but one answer, and that is "Sail on." He says "Sail
on, sail on," over and over