ll
that we were ultimately to have of that vivid individual whom we had so
counted upon as Carl Parker?

I wondered, too, if, in the great opportunity that has come to you,
those simple country boys and girls of Washington were to be thus
deprived,--were to find not you but your "authorities,"--because Carl
Parker refused (even ever so modestly) to learn that Truth, denied the
aid of the free imagination, takes revenge upon her disciple, by
shutting off from him the sources of life by which a man is made free,
and reducing his mind--his rich, variable, potential mind--to the
mechanical operation of a repetitious machine.

I feel this danger for you, and for the youths you are to educate, so
poignantly that I venture to write with this frankness.

Your present imprisonment is not necessarily a life sentence; but your
satisfaction in it--your acceptance of the routine of your treadmill--is
chilling to the hopes of those who have waited upon your progress; and
it imperils your future--as well as that hope we have in the humanities
that are to be implanted in the minds of the young people you are to
instruct. We would not have you remain under the misapprehension that
Truth alone can ever serve humanity--Truth remains sterile until it is
married to Goodness. That marriage is consummated in the high flight of
the imagination, and its progeny is of beauty.

_You_ need beauty--you need verse and color and music--you need all the
escapes--all the doors wide open--and this seemingly impertinent letter
is merely the appeal of one human creature to another, for the sake of
all the human creatures whom you have it in your power to endow with
chains or with wings.

Very sincerely yours,
BRUCE PORTER.

MY DEAR BRUCE PORTER,--

My present impatient attitude towards a mystic being without doubt has
been influenced by some impression of my childhood, but not the
terror-bringing creatures you suggest. My family was one of the last
three which clung to a dying church in my country town. I, though a boy
of twelve, passed the plate for two years while the minister's daughter
sang a solo. Our village was not a happy one, and the incongruity of our
emotional prayers and ecstasies of imagery, and the drifting dullness
and meanness of the life outside, filtered in some way into my boy mind.
I saw that suffering was real and pressing, and so many suffered
resignedly; and that imagery and my companionship with a God (I