and where several routes cross near by that influence becomes very Let us now apply these considerations to the Hawaiian group. 18. Do you think the following is a fair estimate of the effect of the study of science upon the human spirit? If not, state your view precisely, and support it by arguments. Science as it is studied and taught by the moderns is the death of sentiment and of gentle illusions. With it the life of the spirit is straitened. Everything is reduced to fixed rules, and even the sublime beauties of Nature disappear. It is science that destroys the marvellous in the arts as well as faith in the soul. Science tells us that all is a lie, and seeks to express everything in ciphers and lines, not only the sea and the land where we are, but also the highest Heaven where God is. The wonderful yearnings of the soul are only a kind of mystic ecstasy. The very inspiration of the poets is a delusion. The heart is a sponge, the brain only a nest of maggots. - Galdós: Doña Perfecta. APPENDIX A. SELECTIONS FOR ANALYSIS AND CRITICISM. Isolated Paragraphs. 1. It is the making of the wax that costs with the bee. As with the poet, the form, the receptacle, gives him more trouble than the sweet that fills it, though, to be sure, there is always more or less empty comb in both cases. The honey he can have for the gathering, but the wax he must make himself— must evolve from his own inner consciousness. When wax is to be made the waxmakers fill themselves with honey and retire into their chamber for private meditation; it is like some solemn religious rite; they take hold of hands, or hook themselves together in long lines that hang in festoons from the top of the hive, and wait for the miracle to transpire. After about twenty-four hours their patience is rewarded, the honey is turned into wax, minute scales of which are secreted from between the rings of the abdomen of each bee; this is taken off and from it the comb is built up. It is calculated that about twenty-five pounds of honey are used in elaborating one pound of comb, to say nothing of the time that is lost. Hence the importance, in an economical point of view, of a recent device by which the honey is extracted and the comb returned intact to the bees. But honey without the comb is the perfume without the rose, it is sweet merely, and soon degenerates into candy. Half the delectableness is in breaking down these frail and exquisite walls yourself, and tasting the nectar before it has lost its freshness by the contact with the air. Then the comb is a sort of shield or foil that prevents the tongue from being overwhelmed by the shock of the sweet. Burroughs: Birds and Bees. 2. Some time, wandering in a thinned wood, you may have happened upon an old vine, the seed of which had long ago been dropped and had sprouted in an open spot where there was no timber. Every May, in response to Nature's joyful bidding that it yet shall rise, the vine has loosed the thousand tendrils of its hope, those long, green, delicate fingers searching the empty air. Every December you may see these turned stiff and brown, and wound about themselves like spirals or knotted like the claw of a frozen bird. Year after year the vine has grown only at the head, remaining empty-handed; and the head itself, not being lifted always higher by anything the hands have seized, has but moved hither and thither, back and forth, like the head of a-wounded snake in a path. Thus every summer you may see the vine, fallen back and coiled upon itself, and piled up before you like a low green mound, its own tomb; in winter a black heap, its own ruins. So, it often is with the poorest, who live on at the head, remaining empty-handed; fallen in and coiled back upon themselves, their own inescapable tombs, their own unavertible ruins. — Allen: The Choir Invisible. 3. The old conditions of travel and the new conditions of most travel of to-day are precisely opposite. For in old travel, as on horseback or on foot now, you saw the country while you travelled. Many of your stopping-places were for rest, or because night had fallen, and you could see nothing at night. Under the old system, therefore, an intelligent traveller might keep in motion from day to day, slowly, indeed, but seeing something all the time, and learning what the country was through which he passed by talk with the people. But in the new system, he is shut up with his party and a good many other parties in a tight box with glass windows, and whirled on through dust if it be dusty, or rain if it be rainy, under arrangements which make it impossible to converse with the people of the country, and almost impossible to see what that country is. - E. E. Hale: How to Do It. 4. The vast results obtained by science are won by no mystical faculties, by no mental processes, other than those which are practised by every one of us in the humblest and meanest affairs of life. A detective policeman discovers a burglar from the marks made by his shoe, by a mental process identical with that by which Cuvier restored the extinct animals of Montmartre from fragments of their bones. Nor does that process of induction and deduction by which a lady, finding a stain of a particular kind upon her dress, concludes that somebody has upset the inkstand thereon, differ in any way from that by which Adams and Leverrier discovered a new planet. The man of science, in fact, simply uses with scrupulous exactness the methods which we all habitually and at every moment use carelessly. - Huxley: Lay Sermons. 5. After a while she ventured to the top of the gangway stairs, and stood there, looking at the novel sights of the harbor, in the red sunset light, which rose slowly from the hulls and lower spars of the shipping, and kindled the tips of the high-shooting masts with a quickly fading splendor. A delicate flush responded in the east, and rose to meet the denser crimson of the west; a few clouds, incomparably light and diaphanous, bathed themselves in the glow. It was a summer sunset, portending for the land a morrow of great heat. But cool airs crept along the water, and the ferry-boats, thrust shuttlewise back and forth between either shore, made a refreshing sound as they crushed a broad course to foam with their paddles. People were pulling about in small boats; from some the gay cries and laughter of young girls struck sharply along the tide. The noise of the quiescent city came off in a sort of dull moan. The lamps began to twinkle in the windows and the streets on shore; the lanterns of the ships at anchor in the stream showed redder and redder as the twilight fell. The homesickness began to mount from Lydia's heart in a choking lump to her throat; for one must be very happy to endure the sights and sounds of the summer evening anywhere. She had to shield her eyes from the brilliancy of the kerosene light when she went below into the cabin Howells: Lady of the Aroostook. 6. I am told that the matchless writing of Macaulay is nowadays jeered at. I am not sure whether it is allowed to be "style"; I am not sure whether it is allowed to be "literature." I have now and then made some efforts to find out what "style" and "literature" are. I find that they are something very different from Macaulay, something very different from Arnold, something, I might go on to say, very different from Gibbon. I have tried the writings of a notable" stylist," the great living model, I am told, of style. Now, did anybody ever have to read over a sentence of Macaulay, or of Arnold, or even of the artificial Gibbon, a second time simply in order to find out its meaning? But I found that in my "stylist" a plain man could not make out the meaning of a single sentence without greater pains than are needed to follow an imperfectly known foreign language. A story seemed to be told; but there was no making out whether the story was meant to be fact or fiction. I will not say that I have imitated Macaulay's style, because I gather from what I saw of my "stylist" that Macaulay has no "style." I have not consciously imitated his manner of writing; that is, I have not tried to write like him. Yet Macaulay's manner of writing has been in the highest measure an influence with me. I have learned from him to say what I mean and to mean what I say to cut my sentences short - not to be afraid of repeating the same word, not to talk about "the former" and "the latter," but to call men and things whatever they are. I have learned from him to say what I have to say in the purest, the cleanest, the strongest, aye, and the most rhythmical English that I can muster. If my "stylist" is "style" and Lord Macaulay is not "style," a man who wishes to understand will say something more than "sæpe stylum vertas”; he will say good-by to "style" and stick to plain English. - Edward A. Freeman, Forum, April, 1892. 7.- I have before alluded to the strange and vain supposition, that the original conception of Gothic architecture had been derived from vegetation, from the symmetry of avenues, and the interlacing of branches. It is a supposition which never could have existed for a moment in the mind of any person acquainted with early Gothic; but, however idle as a theory, it is most valuable as a testimony to the character of the perfected style. It is precisely because the reverse of this theory is the fact, because the Gothic did not arise out of, but developed itself into, a resemblance to vegetation, that this resemblance is so instructive as an indication of the temper of the builders. It was no chance suggestion of the form of an arch from the bending of a bough, but a gradual and continual discovery of a beauty in natural forms which could be more and more perfectly transferred into those of stone, that influenced at once the heart of the people, and the form of the edifice. The Gothic architecture arose in massy and mountainous |