The Last Harvest

other creatures eat without shame? We paint the bird pecking at fruit, the browsing ox, the lion leaping on his prey, but no painter ever ventured to draw a man eating. T

travellers in the prairie? Did you ever eat the poorest rye or oatcake with a beautiful maiden in the wilderness? an

t. The highest and the lowest are for the moment on the same level. The lady and her maid, the lord and his lackey are all one. Eating your bread on a mountain-top or in the camp of lumbermen or with a beautiful maiden in the wilderness adds a new element. Here the picture has all nature for a background and the imagination is moved. The rye and the oatcake now become a kind of heavenly manna, or, as Fitzgerald has it, under such conditions the wilderness is Paradise enow. The simple act of feeding doe

lution entertaining some British officers (an historical fact) on baked potatoes and salt would appeal to the artistic imagination. All the planting and reaping of the farmers is suggestive of our animal wants, as is so much of our whole industrial activity; but art looks kindly upon much of it, shows us more or less in partners

ved and impressed him so profoundly. Their correspondence, which lasted upwards of forty years, is the most valuable corr

with these noble spirits, so much more exalted than any in our own time, but

f them contains the fragments of a gospel that both were preaching, each in his own way, but at bottom the same-the beauty and majesty of the moral law. Let the heavens fall, the moral law and our duty to God and man will stand. These two men, so different in character and temperament, were ins

his best in these letters than does Carlyle. Carlyle tosses his off with more ease and unconscious mastery. The exchange is always in favor of the Scot. Carlyle was, of course, the more prodigious personality,

compared to glass anyhow, since it is impossible to dissociate it from the matter of his discourse? It is not merely to reveal truth; it is also to enhance its beauty. There is the charm and witchery of style, as in Emerson's own best pages, as well as the worth of the s

attention. His prose is at the best, as in the "Life of Stirling," when it is most transparent and freest from mannerisms. Carlyle's manner at its best is very pleasing; at its worst it b

th the rhetoric than with the matter. He has manly superiority rather than intellectuality, and so makes good hard hits all the time. There is more characte

e writer is everything. The born writer gives us facts and ideas steeped in his own quality as a man. Take out of Carlyle's works, or out of Emerson's, or out of Arnold's, the savor of the man's inborn quality-the savor of that which acts over and above h

in words except in

not merely its garment. We often praise a writer for his choice of words, and Emerson himself says in the same paragraph from which I quote the above: "No man can write well who thinks there is no choice of words for him." There is always a right word and every other than that is wrong. There is always the best word, or the best succession of words to give force and vividness to the idea. All painters use the same colors, all musicians use the sam

ers-the thought or the word-any more than the biochemist can tell us which is first in the living body, the carb