A love for action, hate for solitude;

And thereby send him back to conquer worlds
Within the soul, to live, to die triumphant,
Or in calm defeat to feel a good fight lost
Is better than a life-long search for peace.

Awake! insentient youth, awake, awake!
Thy curved lips the pleasure of thy dreams
Partake! Thy peaceful brow, besprent
With evening's pearls and shadows of the night
Proclaims the peace of revery, not of life.
Awake! put on thy armor for the fight!
Arouse! thou must away at dawn of day!
Already doth the east begin to smile.

Thou needst not tell me why thou camest here;

The longings, cravings of thy mortal heart
Have urged and pressed thee and this solitude
Thou sought'st to soothe and heal ambition's wounds;
To wipe away the sorrows and the gloom
Of disappointments which the world hath forced
On thy young breast, to dwell in peace and live
With nature, free as are the birds that make
This lonely dale resound with sweetest melody:
And ne'er again to feel the cold gray gleam
Of eyes distrustful, glad to criticise.

To live in peace has been and is

The consummation of mortality.

The future holds our hopes and happiness, Our fears and apprehensions dire; but there Is God above the soul and that within

Which prophesies another life; and yet

We know not what nor where; but saddest heart Ne'er lost its hope. The great sun comes and goes But breathes no word of what we feel we know ;

The crescent moon her nightly passage makes
Across the upper deep, but ne'er displays
One signal light nor tosses overboard

One note to tell from whence, nor where we go.
The silent stars give challenge as they pass,

But give no impulse of the countersign

That gives us entrance to the heavenly camp;
Imagination unto realms unknown

Makes flight, wings over restless waters of this life,

And wearily returns and bears us back

No olive leaf as token of emerging life

Beyond the mystic shades which close our eyes;
The gentle friend whose lids we closed last night,
Whose hands lay folded o'er triumphant heart
Can send us back no word, nor intimate
What glorious vision brought atoning peace.

'Tis well we know not what the future holds;
What joys or sorrows lie before, but this
We know, the things we covet most, obtained
No longer satisfy, for we have grown
And reach far out toward future goals in hope
That they will bring us peace and happiness.
And so each milestone only serves to teach
The lesson hard to learn that peace of heart,
A will-'o-the-wisp, lies just beyond our reach.
And so man lives and trusts what is to be.
His faith builds bridges and doth weave him wings,
The web of which hath for its weft, a thread

Of gold, but not a product of this side,
It comes from over there beyond the dews
And damps of yonder hazy line of blue
Which shuts faith's world from mortal eyes.

Awake. The noctuary that hath soothed
Thy sleep is not one high born chord of peace.

And blessed the man who knows his own and builds

A manhood fortified with love and faith;

So come what may, serene and steadfastly
Enthroned he may abide unto the end.

He sleeps and hears me not. Too old, too old.

I idly sought for peace. The world moved on

And dropped me from the race. Sleep on, sleep on.
But may the morning light cause thee to feel

That joy which bringeth happiness is made

Of that delightful discontent, which hope

Of better things inspires;

And though man fails of reaching longed-for goals,

His final estimate is not appraised

By what he is but what he wished to be;

That restlessness will bring the world from darkness into

light;

That underneath it all, there lies the sweet

And glorifying harmony of truth.

BOY AND SOME OF HIS CHARACTERISTICS.*

Genus Pueri is an extraordinary animal in that he is born into the world with desires. It is this characteristic which marks his distinction from the four-footed animals.

First, the desire to break and destroy. This is the imperious period; the genus, with true eastern and regal air lies under his canopy top, and from this position controls even the most complicated of households.

Next, he has the desire to crawl or to fly; he does not know which. At any rate, it is the longing to get somewhere.

Following the desire to rise to his feet and to stretch out his arms, he examines his hands and studies their mechanism. He begins to use blocks and to build. This is the point in the taming of the animal where curiosity, which is the beginning of intelli

*Extract of Free Oration delivered June 14, 1901, byKingsbury Foster.

gence, appears. He stops studying the figures of the carpet, kicks over his block castle and goes to the window and sees other figures, more or less like himself, moving in opposite directions with outstretched arms, all hurrying towards some unseen and unknown goal. As he watches this procession, the air of what as hitherto been his cage grown oppressive. He wants to get out. He wants to see what is beyond the turning in the road. He wants to climb the hill behind the house and see where the red of the sunset really comes from. His desires, multifarious as they may seem, are few. His aspiration to rise in life is limited by the height of a bird's nest, and his longing to get somewhere, is bounded by the first good trout brook. Genus Pueri for the next decade is not unlike other animals in growth, except that there develop in him certain forms of thinking bacteria which do not, however, reach any alarming proportions and are seldom considered dangerous. He learns some of the maxims for self-preservation by a few hard fought fistic encounters with others of the genus, which result more or less to his disfigurement; he learns that he is not lord of creation, at least not in an individual sense. By chance he wanders into his father's library and finds to his surprise that the world has had a past. That it did not bloom into freshness with his begetting and bids fair to endure sometime after his allotted three-score years and ten. Another thing is brought to his recognition as he handles the books of his father's library, which is that every one of the genus of the past have been reaching after something. He finds the theologian traversing the road from Rome to reason in search of happiness. He finds the poet, the novelist, the painter, the sculptorand the statesman begging for fame. He finds that not a few have been getters of dollars. He finds that the impulse of our day is a strife for the "wherewith," and so he reads industriously the current topics in his father's magazines on how to succeed. As told by the great financiers, who have incidentally risen from canal drivers to railroad presidents, and from office boys to bond-holders.

He begins to think that his fitting school education is a loss

of time as most of the great men of the day have not familiarized themselves with the arts. At least, nothing more than in a few hours between the blowing of the whistle and their bed time, which, as the autobiographer says, was prolonged into the vigils of the night until the tallow dip had sputtered and gone out, or the log-wood had burned low. He is deeply impressed by the natural ability which they possessed, and concerning which they never tire of telling of how, when they arrived at the metropolis, or some town which they have since made a metropolis, they walked proudly up the streets with all their earthly possessions packed loosely in an extension grip and took the first work which came to their hands. Then he reads of the transitional period, when, by dint of hard work and studious frugality, they are in a position to dictate the terms and duration of bonds about to be issued by the Secretary of Treasury. The boy subscribes freely to magazines for the promulgation of fiscal talent.

This is the period in the life of the genus pueri when he is inclined to think unduly of himself. It is a disease characteristic of the genus and for which there has been found no preventative or immediate cure. Like the mumps and the measles, it is well to have it early in life, that there may be no aftermath of chronic effects. A diagnosis shows the patient to have certain hallucinations regarding time, place and a general fitness of things. The fever reaches its most ridiculous height at his high school graduation. He stands, as he thinks, on a pinnacle of his own greatness, and with his right arm extended at an angle of forty-five degrees, he tells gray-headed men and matrons the dangers which beset our government. "Our government, which reaches from the pine clad coast of Maine to the sands of the Samoan Island. From the snow banks of Alaska to the palms of Porto Rico." The boy makes an eloquent appeal to his classmates to step into the breach to save Americans from themselves, and to place our government, that government wrought and shaped as it was, in the fierce fires of oppression, beyond the avariciousness of the few. We must, he says, feel for the great pulse of society and