eling to the best account. "A man's reach should exceed
his grasp," a great poet tells us, and even the birds or beavers do
not go on quite blindly with their building, but, when effort on
effort has been destroyed by wind and water or man's interference,
they at last accommodate their instinct to circumstances so as to give
themselves a better chance of fulfilling their deeper purpose. In many
ways we have hardly outgrown the beaver stage: wars, accidents,
disease, disputes--how many times must we try over again the same path
which has led us before into trouble and disaster before we put our
imagination seriously to work on the problem and try to find some more
complete solution?

Of all the dangers of the use of the imagination, perhaps the greatest
of all is the neglect to use it, the denial of it and its consequent
starvation.

E.M. COBHAM.

[16] Mrs Book sees an allusion to this danger, as well as to the
first, in the warnings against covetousness in the Tenth Commandment.

THE PLAY SPIRIT[17]: A CRITICISM.

[17] See the article, "The Play Spirit," in the November issue.

With your contributor's description of the play spirit, that happy
leisure from self and its responsibilities in order that time and
thought and heart may be filled with wider inspiration, most of your
readers will, I think, entirely agree, and all of us will be grateful
for the spirited claim on behalf of "play."

The one criticism that occurs to the mind is that a touch of
professionalism, of patronage towards the ordinary person, has crept
into the author's thought and peeps out through many of the sentences.

"Common men" ... "ordinary everyday people" ... "average humanity,"
... "a worker" who ... "cannot play"; does the writer of the Play
Spirit really show us what is in their hearts? He is an artist in
words, he is a keen admirer of other arts, he is interested in
thinking; it seems all but impossible to him that anyone can have
"freedom" without the power of expressing it, without even the
consciousness of its possession.

We are all too apt, I think, to imagine that our own discoveries of
the mystery and magic of life are peculiar to ourselves, or shared
only with a sympathetic few, passed on sometimes (by the _very_ few
who have both will and power to do so) to such of the outsiders as are
interested enough to enter into that enchanted garden and take gifts
from it. But has not the supreme discovery of the greatest ar