ch flight like a ladder in naked sky.
The walls all round me failed and faded into infinity; I went up the
ladder to my bedroom as Montrose went up the ladder to the gallows; sic
itur ad astro. Do you think this is a little fantastic--even a little
fearful and nervous? Believe me, it is only one of the wild and
wonderful things that one can learn by stopping at home.

The Three Kinds of Men

Roughly speaking, there are three kinds of people in this world. The
first kind of people are People; they are the largest and probably the
most valuable class. We owe to this class the chairs we sit down on,
the clothes we wear, the houses we live in; and, indeed (when we come
to think of it), we probably belong to this class ourselves. The second
class may be called for convenience the Poets; they are often a nuisance
to their families, but, generally speaking, a blessing to mankind.
The third class is that of the Professors or Intellectuals; sometimes
described as the thoughtful people; and these are a blight and a
desolation both to their families and also to mankind. Of course, the
classification sometimes overlaps, like all classification. Some good
people are almost poets and some bad poets are almost professors. But
the division follows lines of real psychological cleavage. I do not
offer it lightly. It has been the fruit of more than eighteen minutes of
earnest reflection and research.

The class called People (to which you and I, with no little pride,
attach ourselves) has certain casual, yet profound, assumptions, which
are called "commonplaces," as that children are charming, or that
twilight is sad and sentimental, or that one man fighting three is a
fine sight. Now, these feelings are not crude; they are not even simple.
The charm of children is very subtle; it is even complex, to the extent
of being almost contradictory. It is, at its very plainest, mingled of
a regard for hilarity and a regard for helplessness. The sentiment of
twilight, in the vulgarest drawing-room song or the coarsest pair of
sweethearts, is, so far as it goes, a subtle sentiment. It is strangely
balanced between pain and pleasure; it might also be called pleasure
tempting pain. The plunge of impatient chivalry by which we all admire a
man fighting odds is not at all easy to define separately, it means
many things, pity, dramatic surprise, a desire for justice, a delight in
experiment and the indeterminate. The ideas of the mob are really