eer
overwork,--the using of a delicately-tuned instrument too commonly and
continuously and carelessly to let it last its normal life. We may well
talk of the waste of wood and water, of food and fire, but the real and
unforgivable waste of modern civilization is the waste of ability and
genius,--the killing of useful, indispensable men who have no right to
die; who deserve, not for themselves, but for the world, leisure,
freedom from distraction, expert medical advice, and intelligent
sympathy.

Coleridge-Taylor's life work was not finished,--it was but well begun.
He lived only his first period of creative genius, when melody and
harmony flashed and fluttered in subtle, compelling, and more than
promising profusion. He did not live to do the organized, constructive
work in the full, calm power of noonday,--the reflective finishing of
evening. In the annals of the future his name must always stand high,
but with the priceless gift of years, who can say where it might not
have stood.

Why should he have worked so breathlessly, almost furiously? It was, we
may be sure, because with unflinching determination and with no thought
of surrender he faced the great alternative,--the choice which the
cynical, thoughtless, busy, modern world spreads grimly before its
greater souls--food or beauty, bread and butter, or ideals. And
continually we see worthier men turning to the pettier, cheaper
thing--the popular portrait, the sensational novel, the jingling song.
The choice is not always between the least and the greatest, the high
and the empty, but only too often it is between starvation and
something. When, therefore, we see a man, working desperately to earn a
living and still stooping to no paltry dickering and to no unworthy
work, handing away a "Hiawatha" for less than a song, pausing for
glimpses of the stars when a world full of charcoal glowed far more
warmly and comfortably, we know that such a man is a hero in a sense
never approached by the swashbuckling soldier or the lying patriot.

Deep as was the primal tragedy in the life of Coleridge-Taylor, there
lay another still deeper. He smiled at it lightly, as we all do,--we who
live within the veil,--to hide the deeper hurt. He had, with us, that
divine and African gift of laughter, that echo of a thousand centuries
of suns. I mind me how once he told of the bishop, the well-groomed
English bishop, who eyed the artist gravely, with his eye-glass--hair
and color and f