lf. But
because he was interested in other things, the editor of an English
Review found here material for a fruitful discussion of "The Higher
Life of American Cities." Multitudes have sojourned here during a
score of years and have not so much as heard of orgies and excesses.
Yet if the bee is blind to all save flowers; if the worm cares only
for rotten wood; if the mole bores downward, so there are natures that
cannot rest until they have ferreted out that which they lovingly seek
and eagerly desire to find. Habits also reveal personality. First the
river digs the channel, then the channel controls the river, and when
the faculties, by repetition, have formed habits, those habits become
grooves and channels for controlling the faculties. What grievous
marks were in poor Coleridge! Once this scholar spent a fortnight upon
an annual address. But while the audience was assembling Coleridge
left his friends and stepped out the rear door of the hall to go in
search of his favorite drug, leaving his audience to master its
disappointment as best it could.

And here is Robert Burns, bearing about in his body also the marks of
his ownership. For this matchless genius was wrecked and ruined not by
the wiles of him of the cloven foot, but by temptations that have been
called "godlike." This glorious youth was not beguiled from the path
by a desire to be a cold and calculating villain in his treatment of
Jean, or to die of drink in his prime, or to leave his widow and
orphans in poverty. Burns loved upward, loved noble things and
beautiful; and his very love of beauty and grace, his love of good
company, of wit, laughter and song, and all the stormy splendors of
youth at springtide--these are the snares and wiles that caught his
beautiful genius and led it away captive.

To-day, for him who hath eyes to see, the marks of a like immoderation
are upon our generation also. What a revelation of the taste of our
age is found in the new love of highly spiced literature! All history
holds no nobler literature than that in the English tongue. Our poetry
furnishes nectar for angels! Our philosophies bread for giants! The
essayists furnish food for the gods! Nevertheless, a multitude have
turned from this glorious feast to the highly spiced literature of
fiction.

A traveler tells of watching bees linger so long beside the vats of
the distillery that they became maudlin. And the love of high
stimulants in literature is one of the char