her class so truly as of writers can it be
said that they sacrifice the real to the ideal, life to fame. They
conquer the world by renouncing it. Its fleeting pleasures, its
enchantment of business or listlessness, its social enjoyments, the
vexations and health-giving bliss of domestic life, and all wandering
tastes, must be forsaken. A power which pierces, and an ambition which
enjoys the future, accepts the martyrdom of the present. They feel
loneliness in their own age, while with universal survey viewing the
beacon-lights of history across the peaks of generations. Their seat of
life is the literary faculty, and they prune and torture themselves only
to maintain in this the highest intensity and capacity. They are in some
sort rebels battling against time, not the humble well-doer content
simply to live and bless God. Between them and living men there is the
difference which exists between analytical and geometrical mathematics:
the former has to do with signs, the latter with realities. The former
contains the laws of the physical world, but a man may know and use
them like an adept, and yet be ignorant of physics. He may know all
there is of algebra, without seeing that the universe is masked in it.
The signs would be not means, but ultimates to it. So a writer may never
penetrate through the veil of language to the realities behind,--may
know only the mechanism, and not the spirit of learning and literature.
His mind is then skeleton-like,--his thought is the shadow of a shade.

And yet is not life greater than art? Why transform real ideas and
sentiments into typographical fossils? Why have we forgotten the theory
of human life as a divine vegetation? Why not make our hearts the focus
of the lights which we strive to catch in books? Why should the wealthy
passivity of the Oriental genius be so little known among us? Why
conceive of success only as an outward fruit plucked by conscious
struggle? Banish books, banish reading, and how much time and strength
would be improvised in which to benefit each other! We might become
ourselves embodiments of all the truth and beauty and goodness now
stagnant in libraries, and might spread their aroma through the social
atmosphere. The dynamics would supplant the mechanics of the soul. In
the volume of life the literary man knows only the indexes; but he would
then be introduced to the radiant, fragrant, and buoyant contents, to
the beauty and the mystery, to the great passio