inter
seeking in the work-house a model for his "job," an actress visiting
the hospital to learn how to simulate dying,--these show the modern
appetite for the morbid. Modern music, too, does not escape the times'
spirit. The sad Titanic works of Wagner, the friend and disciple of
Schopenhauer, bear witness to the mystical affinity of music and
despair.

Most of our great critics of life,--Saint Beauve, Carlyle, Matthew
Arnold, Scherer, Amiel, Tolstoi, and Ruskin--have felt, or at least
recognized, the powerful fascination of the new evangel of bafflement
and despair.

The hastiest glance at recent European poetry shows the prominence of
the mystery of pain. Poetry from Byron, Leopardi, and Heine, to
Pushkin and Carmen Sylva, Baudelaire and Matthew Arnold, has circled
about the tragedy of suffering and disenchantment. Even Tennyson sadly
asks in a recent poem:--

"What is it all, if we all of us end but in being our own
corpse-coffins at last,
Swallowed in Vastness, lost in Silence, drowned in the deeps
of a meaningless Past?"

Since the time of Goethe, poetry has turned from Hellenic to Hindoo
sources. Cultured Europe seizes with a strange eagerness on the
sublime, dreamy conceptions that underlie Hindoo pantheism--Sansara,
the unabiding pain-world; Nirvana world of rest and re-absorption; the
deceptive veil of Maya, the wheel of life, the melting bubbles poured
from the bowl of Saki, the Brahma fallen from unity and serenity into
multiplicity and pain, the illusion of birth and death, the evil of
all individual existence, the retreat from life, the euthanasia of the
will and the return to non-existence,--these with their rich train of
imagery thrill the jaded and _blase_ European with a rare and profound
emotion. Besides these spoils, the poet of to-day revels in the
results of later metaphysics. The naive balance of pleasure and pain
is disturbed. Suffering becomes an almost supernatural fact hid in a
halo of mystery, and is not to be blotted out by any quantity of joy.
One single pang is enough to condemn the world as worse than
nothingness. This inexplicable fact of suffering takes on a mystical
meaning, and becomes thereby the pivot of a new faith. And so, as the
altar lights of the old worship of sorrow grow dim, there rises the
legend of a suffering unconscious.

THE HEART OF THE WOODS.

BY WILL ALLEN DROMGOOLE.

Twilight fell softly over Beersheba, beautiful Beersheba.