Who could have thought such darkness lay concealed
Within thy beams, O Sun? or who could find,
Whilst fly and leaf and insect stood revealed,
That to such countless orbs thou mad'st us blind?
Why do we, then, shun Death with anxious strife?
If Light can thus deceive, wherefore not Life?

HITE, RICHARD GRANT, an American essayist and critic; born at New York, May 22, 1821; died there, April 8, 1885. He was graduated from the University of the City of New York; studied law, and was admitted to the bar in 1845. But he previously had turned his attention to literature, and never entered upon legal practice. Before he had reached his majority he published anonymously a fine sonnet upon Washington, which came to be attributed to more than one poet of note among whom were Wordsworth and Landor. Without being ostensibly the editor of any periodical, he was editorially connected with several newspapers and magazines. For more than twenty years ending in 1878- he held positions in the United States Revenue Service at New York. His works, while covering a wide range of topics, relate mainly to general philology, and especially to Shakespeare and his writings. His most important works are Handbook of Christian Art (1853); Shakespeare's Scholar (1854); Three Parts of Henry VI. (1859); National Hymns (1861); Life and Genius of Shakespeare (1865); The New Gospel of Peace (1866); Words and Their Uses (1870); Every-day English (1880); England Without and Within (1881); The Fate of Mansfield Humphrey

(1884); Studies in Shakespeare (1885), and History of Italian Opera in New York.

WASHINGTON: PATER PATRIÆ.

High over all whom might or mind made great,
Yielding the conqueror's crown to harder hearts,
Exalted not by politicians' arts,

Yet with a will to meet and master Fate

And skill to rule a young, divided state,

Greater by what was not than what was done,
Alone on History's height stands Washington;

And teeming Time shall not bring forth his mate.
For only he, of men, on earth was sent

In all the might of mind's integrity;

Ne'er as in him truth, strength, and wisdom blent; And that his glory might eternal be,

A boundless country is his monument, A mighty nation his posterity.

SHAKESPEARE'S CREATIVE GENIUS.

Shakespeare used the skeletons of former life that had drifted down to him upon the stream of time, and were cast at his feet a heap of mere dead matter. But he clothed them with flesh and blood, and breathed into their nostrils; and they lived and moved with a life that was individual and self-existent after he had once thrown it off from his own exuberant intellectual vitality. He made his plays no galleries of portraits of his contemporaries, carefully seeking his models through the social scale, from king to beggar. His teeming brain bred lowlier beggars and kinglier kings than all Europe could have furnished as subjects for his portraiture. He found in his own consciousness ideals, the like of which, for beauty or deformity, neither he nor any other man had ever looked upon. In his heart were the motives, the passions of all humanity; in his mind the capability, if not the actuality, of all human thought. Nature, in forming him, alone of all the poets, had laid that touch

upon his soul which enabled him to live at will throughout all time, among all peoples.

Capable thus, in his complete and symmetrical nature, of feeling with and thinking for all mankind, he found in an isolated and momentary phase of his own existence the law which governed the life of those to whom that single phase was their whole sphere. From the germ within himself he produced the perfect individual as it had been or might have been developed. The eternal laws of human life were his servants by his heavenbestowed prerogative, and he was yet their instrument. Conformed to them because instinct with them, obedient to yet swaying them, he used their subtle and unerring powers to work out from seemingly trivial and independent truths the vast problems of humanity; and, standing ever within the limits of his own experience, he read and reproduced the inner life of those on the loftiest heights or in the lowest depths of being, with the certainty of the physiologist who from the study of his own organization re-creates the monsters of the antehuman world, or of the astronomer who, not moving from his narrow study, announced the place, form, movement, and condition of a planet then hid from earthly eyes in the abyss of space.

Shakespeare thus suffered not even a temporary absorption of his personages; he lost not the least consciousness of selfhood, or the creator's power over the clay he was moulding. He was at no time a murderer in his heart because he drew Macbeth, or mad because he made King Lear. We see that, although he thinks with the brain and feels with the soul of each of his personages by turns, he has the power of deliberate introspection during this strange metempsychosis, and of standing outside of his transmuted self, and regarding these forms which his mind takes on as we do; in a word, of being at the same time actor and spectator.Life and Genius of Shakespeare.

τα

HITE, STEWART EDWARD, an American novelist; born at Grand Rapids, Mich., March 12, 1873. He was graduated from the University of Michigan in 1895, and studied law at the Columbia Law School in 1896-7. His novels include The Westerners (1901); The Claim Jumpers (1901); The Blazed Trail (1902); Conjuror's House (1903); The Forest (1903); The Mountain (1905).

ON THE CATCHING OF A CERTAIN FISH.

*

WE settled down peacefully on the River, and the weather, after so much enmity, was kind to us. Likewise did the flies disappear from the woods utterly.

Each morning we arose as the Red Gods willed; generally early, when the sun was just gilding the peaks to the westward; but not too early, before the white veil had left the River. Billy, with woodsman's contempt for economy, hewed great logs and burned them nobly in the cooking of trout, oatmeal, pancakes, and the like. We had constructed ourselves tables and benches between green trees, and there we ate. And great was the eating, beyond the official capacity of the human stomach. There offered little things to do delicious little things just on the hither side of idleness. A rod wrapping needed more waxed silk, a favorite fly required attention to prevent dissolution; the pistol was to be cleaned; a flag-pole seemed desirable; a trifle more of balsam could do no harm; clothes might stand drying, blankets airing. We accomplished these things leisurely, pausing for the telling of stories, for the puffing of pipes, for the sheer joy of contemplations. Deerskin slipper moccasins and flapping trousers attested our dishabille. And then somehow it was noon, and Billy again at the Dutch oven and the broiler.

Copyright, 1903, by THE OUTLOOK COMPANY.

Trout we ate, and always more trout. Big ellows broiled with strips of bacon craftily sewn in and out of the pink flesh; medium fellows cut into steaks; little fellows fried crisp in corn-meal; big, medium, and little fellows mingled in component of the famous North Country bouillon, whose other ingredients are partridges and tomatoes and potatoes and onions and salt pork and flour, in combination delicious beyond belief. Nor ever did we tire of them, ree times a day, printed statement to the contrary notwithstanding. And besides were many crafty dishes over whose construction the major portion of morning idleness was spent.

Now, at two o'clock, we groaned temporary little groans, and crawled, shrinking, into our river clothes, which we dared not to hang too near the fire for fear of the disintegrating scorch, and drew on soggy, hobnailed shoes, with holes cut in the bottom, and plunged with howls of disgust into the upper riffles. Then the cautious leg-straddled passage of the swift current, during which we forgot forever which eternity alone circles the bliss of an afternoon on the River the chill of the water, and so came to the trail.

Now, at the Idiot's Delight, Dick and I parted company. By three o'clock I came again to the River, far up, half-way to the Big Falls. Deuce watched me gravely. With the first click of the reel he retired to the brush away from the backcast, there to remain until the pool was fished, and we could continue our journey.

In the swift leaping water, at the smooth back of the eddy, in the white foam, under the dark cliff shadow, here, there, everywhere, the bright flies drop softly like strange snowflakes. The game is as interesting as pistolshooting. To hit the mark, that is enough. And then a swirl of water and a broad, lazy tail wakes you to the fact that other matters are yours. Verily the fish of the North Country are mighty beyond all others.

Over the river rests the sheen of light, over the hills rests the sheen of romance. The land is enchanted Birds dip and sway, advance and retreat, leaves toss their hands in greeting, or bend and whisper one to the other; splashes of sun fall heavy as metal through the