meadow in a broidery of blackberries and asters and dogroses
and goldenrod. She never works without playing; and she plays even while
man is working--plays so graciously and winningly that it takes the
heart with joy. Who has ever looked upon an old-world wheat-field, where
poppies and vetches are frolicking among the ears, and begrudged Nature
her pastime? No one, we will venture, but the owner of the field, who is
perhaps also too much of a philosopher to grieve over it. In the ideal
world it is much the same. There, too, art having chosen a kind brings
it to bear with all the other kinds which have been lurking in the
unconscious soil of the mind and only waiting tilth for any purpose
before springing up in company with the selected seed. This is what
makes the poets and novelists and dramatists so much more profitable
reading than the moralists. From whom, indeed, has the vital wisdom of
the race been garnered? Not from those hard, ethical masters who have
sought to narrow culture to the business of growing precepts, but from
the genial teachers who have inculcated amusement and breathed into the
unwary mind some inspiration which escaped as unconsciously from
themselves. Which philosopher or sage of them all has instructed mankind
a hundredth part as much as Shakespeare, who supposed himself to be
merely providing diversion for the patrons of the Globe Theatre?

It follows, if not directly, then a long way about, from what we have
been saying, that the real artist is never at a loss for a subject. His
trouble is too many themes, not too few; and, having chosen among them,
his error will be in an iron sequence rather than in a desultory
progression. He is to arrive, if at all, laden with the spoil of the
wayside, and bringing with him the odor of the wild flowers carpeting or
roofing the by-paths; if he is a little bothered by the flowering
brambles which have affectionately caught at him in his course, that
does not greatly matter; or, at least, it is better than coming back to
his starting-point in boots covered with the mud of the high-road or
coat powdered with its dust. The sauntering ease, the excursive delays,
will be natural to the poet or the novelist, who is born to them; but
the essayist must in a manner make them his own, if he would be an
artist and survive among the masters, which there has been some doubt of
his doing. It should be his care to shun every appearance of continuity;
only in the practice o