ch are as brave as pennants in a breeze, is comfortable
and sedative. One's own secret and awkward convictions, never expressed
because not lawful and because it is hard to get words to bear them
lightly, seem then to be heard aloud in the mild, easy, and confident
diction of an immortal whose voice has the blitheness of one who has
watched, amused and irreverent, the high gods in eager and secret
debate on the best way to keep the gilt and trappings on the body of
the evil they have created.

That first-rate explorer, Gulliver, is also fine in the light of the
intimate candle. Have you read lately again his Voyage to the
Houyhnhnms? Try it alone again in quiet. Swift knew all about our
contemporary troubles. He has got it all down. Why was he called a
misanthrope? Reading that last voyage of Gulliver in the select
intimacy of midnight I am forced to wonder, not at Swift's hatred of
mankind, not at his satire of his fellows, not at the strange and
terrible nature of this genius who thought that much of us, but how it
is that after such a wise and sorrowful revealing of the things we
insist on doing, and our reasons for doing them, and what happens after
we have done them, men do not change. It does seem impossible that
society could remain unaltered, after the surprise its appearance
should have caused it as it saw its face in that ruthless mirror. We
point instead to the fact that Swift lost his mind in the end. Well,
that is not a matter for surprise.

Such books, and France's _Isle of Penguins_, are not disturbing as
bed-books. They resolve one's agitated and outraged soul, relieving it
with some free expression for the accusing and questioning thoughts
engendered by the day's affairs. But they do not rest immediately to
hand in the bookshelf by the bed. They depend on the kind of day one
has had. Sterne is closer. One would rather be transported as far as
possible from all the disturbances of earth's envelope of clouds, and
_Tristram Shandy_ is sure to be found in the sun.

But best of all books for midnight are travel books. Once I was lost
every night for months with Doughty in the _Arabia Deserta_. He is a
craggy author. A long course of the ordinary facile stuff, such as one
gets in the Press every day, thinking it is English, sends one
thoughtless and headlong among the bitter herbs and stark boulders of
Doughty's burning and spacious expanse; only to get bewildered, and the
shins broken, and a great fatigue