S M afford our readers (as far as we can) the same opportunity with ourselves for independent judgment; and carefully to point out any mistakes into which we may discover ourselves to have fallen. We will do our best, I say, to present the evidence in such form that others may be able to judge of its value as well as ourselves. But we cannot make bricks without straw. The success of the inquiry depends in reality on the number of persons whom we can persuade to expend a certain amount of time, trouble, and tact, in collecting first-hand evidence from their own acquaintances. Our group of active and capable volunteer collectors is a grow. ing one; and we observe that, as soon as any one has looked deeply enough into the matter to feel its reality, his interest is pretty certain to continue and to increase. Considering how many people there are who are anxious for more light on the deepest problems, we may fairly hope that more and more of them will come to see that it is by collecting facts, and not by cherishing aspirations or spinning fancies, that light is ultimately won. Light, I repeat, on the deepest problems which can occupy mankind. For although I have thought it right to explain that in the view of the majority of the savants who have set their sanction on this inquiry the fresh knowledge to be looked for is such as will fall within the domain of accepted science, ordinary psychology, yet I have no wish to conceal my own confident hope that more light will thus be shed, even as (I hold) much light has already been shed, on man's inmost nature, and his prospect of survival after death. Up till the present time there has been scarcely any serious attempt to collect and weigh the actual evidence for our survival, in the same way as we collect and weigh the evidence often still more sporadic and inferential for all kinds of phenomena in the past or present history of the earth and man. The inquiry is virtually a new one; and although to those who are wont to scale the infinite with leaps and bounds ours may seem a sadly terre-à-terre proceeding, yet the advantage of terre-dterre progress is that at least you feel firm ground beneath your feet. A pike and a perchmy readers will recognize that this is a fact and not an apologue were once confined in a tank, each on one side of a glass partition. For some months the pike butted constantly against the transparent barrier, with no Than burns and thrills in sunrise, when the dew Flames, and absorbs the glory round it shed, As they the light of ages quick and dead, Closed now, forsake us: yet the shaft that slew Can slay not one of all the works we knew, Nor death discrown that many-laurelled head. The works of words whose life seems lightning wrought, And moulded of unconquerable thought, And quickened with imperishable flame, Stand fast and shine and smile, assured that nought May fade of all their myriad-moulded fame, Pass likewise thither where to-night is he, Beyond the irremeable outer seas that shine And darken round such dreams as half divine Some sunlit harbor in that starless sea Where gleams no ship to windward or to lee, To read with him the secret of thy shrine. There too, as here, may song, delight, and love, The nightingale, the sea-bird, and the dove, The sun, may match the sovereign eagle's eye. V. December 14th. Among the wondrous ways of men and time He went as one that ever found and sought And bore in hand the lamplike spirit of thought To illume with instance of its fire sublime The dusk of many a cloudlike age and clime. No spirit in shape of light and darkness wrought, No faith, no fear, no dream, no rapture, nought That blooms in wisdom, nought that burns in crime, No virtue girt and armed and, helmed with light, No love more lovely than the snows are white, No serpent sleeping in some dead soul's tomb, No song-bird singing from some live soul's height, But he might hear, interpret, or illume With sense invasive as the dawn of doom. VI. What secret thing of splendor or of shade Surmised in all those wandering ways wherein Man, led of love and life and death and sin, Strays, climbs, or cowers, allured, absorbed, afraid, Might not the strong and sunlike sense invade Of that full soul that had for aim to win Light, silent over time's dark toil and din, Life, at whose touch death fades as dead things fade? O spirit of man, what mystery moves in thee That he might know not of in spirit, and see The heart within the heart that seems to For EIGHT DOLLARS, remitted directly to the Publishers, the LIVING AGE will be punctually forwarded for a year, free of postage Remittances should be made by bank draft or check, or by post-office money-order, if possible. If neither of these can be procured, the money should be sent in a registered letter. All postmasters are obliged to register letters when requested to do so. Drafts, checks, and money-orders should be made payable to the order of LITTELL & Co. Single Numbers of THE LIVING Age, 18 cents. 5 From The Nineteenth Century. better chance of acceptance, if it had not been encumbered with the scheme of the IN the year 1712 Dr. Jonathan Swift, academy on the Paris model, unwelcome the renowned author of "Gulliver's Trav- to the English people because it was els" and the "Tale of a Tub," one of the French, if for no other reason; and might literary magnates of an eminently literary have been considered on its merits, as the age, published a pamphlet, containing a Dean of St. Patrick's doubtless hoped proposal for "correcting, improving, and that it would be. But in those days every. 'ascertaining' the English tongue." The thing that was French was unpopular; idea excited little attention except among and literature itself was not much regarded the witlings and petty punsters, who hung unless its influence was directed to the on to the skirts of literature, as their suc- support of factions and parties which were cessors do now, and who did their best, or then, as now, the scandal and misfortune their worst, to turn it into ridicule. These of Great Britain and all free countries, people were especially hostile in their own and governments dependent upon mob small way to the notion that the govern- support. Had the ruling powers of that ment should give any assistance to the day understood the importance of litproject of establishing an Academy of erature to a great nation great because Letters, similar to that which had not long of its literature, as well as on account of previously been instituted in France by its arts, its arms, and its material wealth royal authority. The academy was the and had had sagacity and forethought main recommendation of the plan by which enough to include a minister of education, Dr. Swift hoped to effect his much-needed as well as a minister of war, of finance, reform. The proposal, in spite of the in- and of foreign affairs, among its high difference and the opposition with which functionaries, the project of the dean it was received, had much to recommend might have fared better at the hands of it, although the necessity of such a regu- his contemporaries. This is a consumlation of the literary language of the na- mation, however, to which the nation has tion was much less imperative than it has not even yet arrived, though some apsince become. Dean Swift was not san- proaches have been made towards it. guine enough to hope that the reformation In our School Board era when the new would apply to the wild and reckless col-generations are being taught to handle the loquial speech of the multitudes which tools of knowledge, to read, to write, and then as now was overburdened by vulgar to cast accounts, and boys and girls think slang unfit for the purposes of literature, themselves educated because these tools and confined his efforts at correction and of education are put within their reach, improvement to the language employed in although the skill and the power to use books, or in the speech of the educated them to advantage are not given them, or classes, of the bar, of the pulpit, and of the are possible to be acquired by them in the senate, and the ordinary conversation of fierce competition for bare existence, conrefined and intelligent people. In those sequent on the excess of population and days slang was almost wholly confined to the overcrowded state of the labor market the lowest classes, to the tramps, the beg-in our narrow islands -a revival of the gars, and the thieves, to whom books and project of Dean Swift might have a more letters were unknown, and whose jargon | favorable chance of acceptance by the had not penetrated out of the slums, and the haunts of the dishonest and disreputable, into the ordinary conversation of gentlemen and gentlewomen, or become the stock in trade of vulgar and aggressive journalists of the lowest grade, and had not grown into excrescences and deformities on the fair body of literature. State than it had in his day. The questions involved are still open for discussion. Our noble speech promises to become the predominant, though not perhaps the only, language of the civilization of the coming centuries, and is already heard like the morning drum-beat of British power in every part of the globe. Possibly the project would have had a It floats upon the wings of a widely per |