apostles. While Tennyson has caught his spirit and excelled him in his artistic ability, it is the peculiar glory of Wordsworth to have led the way and set the pattern. Everybody knows how in Wordsworth's case this was accomplished at the expense of years of ridicule and neglect. Everybody knows how the great poet created his own taste and his own audiences, which are now as well assured unto him even until the end of the world as those of Plato are to Plato.

Probably in no place does the higher poetry reach its goal more perfectly than in our hymnody. Had it not been for its hymn book Christianity would long since have been numbered among the perished religions. Its hymnody is the lungs of the Christian, into which he draws the airs of heaven and thus cleanses his spiritual blood, poisoned by contact with the corruption of the world. The dogmas of the church are kept alive through the power of the hymn-book. Here also we find, translated into a language which the laboring man, "though a fool, need not err therein," all the mighty hopes which make us men. Every great wave of spirituality leaves its record in some inspiring and inspired hymn. The little volume of gospel hymns originally written by Sankey, Bliss, and a few other elect spirits has done as much towards the preservation of the Christian spirit from the scientific scepticism and agnosticism of the last twenty years as Luther or Wesley did by their poetry in their respective centuries to protect it from other equally dangerous foes that then surrounded it.

All art is expression. We are surrounded by a shoreless and fenceless world of beauty and spirituality, and art, whether in color, stone, sound, or words, is simply its translation-always more or less imperfect. No work of art is genuine unless it leads us up to and points out to us the Beyond. That is the greatest canvas, cathedral, statue, or song in which the inexpressible is the most clearly hinted at and the invisible the most closely approached. That is the greatest poem which, like Wordsworth's "Ode to Immortality" or Browning's "Saul," brings us face to face with the mighty fact that "The things which are seen are temporal, but the things which are unseen are eternal,"

For this reason music is the closest to religion of all her handmaids. Music is the white-robed maid of honor whose office is to bring in the bride. Music is the fairy bridge over which we poor mortals may pass from this kingdom of limitations, where we see as through a glass darkly, to that higher kingdom where "hope shall change to glad fruition, faith to sight, and prayer to praise." Abt Vogler truthfully says:

"God has a few of us to whom he whispers in the ear;

The rest may reason and welcome; 'tis we musicians know." And for this reason art will never be exhausted. As well attempt to exhaust space or find the beginning of time. Better poems will yet be written and better pictures yet be painted than have ever been either written or painted. We have only just begun to realize the possibilities and white splendors of marble. Music, with its beautiful disdain, still soars above us like the dome of a June sky, notwithstanding all the mighty works of all its mighty masters. And why not? Poetry, painting, architecture, music, and sculpture are so many beautiful roads to the Most High. Their highest province is Expression—the realization and translating to our dull human minds of that "light which never was on land or sea," of "that calm soul of all things," of that "power not ourselves which makes for righteousnes," and of that Divine Personality of Love which is the open secret of all the religions and the inspirer of all that is greatest and best in human conduct -the poet's dream, the artist's ideal-the unveiling of whose ways in humanity and time constitutes revelation.

LOGANSPORT, IND.

OUR WAR VETERAN.

BY ZOE ANDERSON NORRIS.

Ο

UR war veteran drew a pension of $25 a month because

he was deaf; but why he should have drawn a pension

for such a reason was one of the mysteries to me. Think of the noise he missed, the thundering of heavy wagons over rough roads, the whir of machinery, the quarrelling of men and women, the crying of babies, the thousand and one rude sounds which go to try the soul of the man who hears, and from which he calmly sat apart, serenely aloof from that much, at least, of the jar and fret of life.

He had been seriously affected by deafness only of late years; hence the pension. This was also a curious thing. Could the mighty thunder of cannon at so remote a date affect the tympanum thirty years after? If so, how delicate that tympanum! How wonderful that, delicate as it was, it I should have borne all the brunt of the battlefield at close range, only to succumb at last at a range of such extreme length!

Perhaps it was the memory of the terrible sound of those guns which beat upon his ears (but how could a memory beat upon ears?) with such turbulence as to hopelessly deafen him to the extent that-at times-he couldn't hear thunder. I say "at times," for there were other times when he could hear 'most anything. Strange as it may seem, I am positive he had seasons of deafness and, notwithstanding the drawing of that pension, seasons again of hearing very well indeed; though, on account of the pension, of course I shouldn't want this to go any further.

I have seen him when his wife asked him for a five-dollar bill with which to buy much-needed shoes for the children; and it was really pitiful the way he closed his hand hollowly behind his best ear as he vainly endeavored to catch the drift of her remark. Her voice seemed more remote to him than the thunder of those cannons that had fatally deafened him

thirty years before; that is, those cannons that had thundered in his ears thirty years before and deafened him thirty years after, or it is impossible to explain it. To tell the truth, I don't understand very well how the thing happened; and how can you explain a thing you don't understand yourself?

Somehow the war veteran was never able fully to comprehend his wife's meaning in regard to those shoes and that fivedollar bill; and she, afraid of attracting the attention of all the neighbors by her frantic efforts to make him hear, finally went to work at something or other-taking in sewing or washing or mopping, I have forgotten just which—and made money to buy the shoes herself, seeing that was the only showing to get them.

But that very same day a friend of his whispered to him from across the street: "I say, Jim, don't you want to play a game of checkers?" and the deaf man promptly crossed over, and went on upstairs with him to a little back room, where the two played until the sun went down and the room grew so dark they couldn't see the checker-men.

The same thing often happened. His deafness was not confined to different days, hours, or minutes. Periods of complete deafness were so closely followed by other periods of hearing better than most, that I began to look upon our war veteran as something of a curiosity.

I was walking up street with him one morning, attracting the attention of the passers-by, screaming out all my private affairs at the top of my voice, when we passed two men standing on a corner. One of them, in an ordinary tone, said to the other:

"Did you see that long string of newlights John Grimes caught out at Salt River yesterday?"

The war veteran's deafer ear was turned to the man who spoke, but he brightened visibly, hurried me straight home, and commenced to look for his fishing tackle. Such a tremendous overhauling of dust-covered things in the attic in search of old fishing-coats, leggins, trousers, and boots as ensued; such climbing over hayracks in the barn, reaching for last season's long fishing poles hung on two nails driven high up and far apart, leaving room for the heavy poles to sag a

PLAZA OF THE POETS.

THE DIAL OF ARDEN.

BY WINWOOD WAITT.

Under the dim old towers of Arden,
Half in glimmer and half in gloom,
All in the desolate high-court garden,
Lost in a wilderness world of bloom;
Hard by the ruined fountain lying,
Gray, forgotten, and overgrown,
Still to the constant sun replying,

Gleams the dial of sculptured stone.

The great oaks trample in silken grasses;
The ivy mantles the mighty wall;
The beeches, heaving their billowy masses,
Lift to the battlements grim and tall;
The broken nymph, by the fountain basin,
Tips her tankard of tarnished gold,
With a stony stare at her grotesque face in
The pool's dead shallows-as of old.

And over the dial the deepening mosses

Creep, like the shadow of Time; and slow The years drift by with their gains and losses; The great oaks bourgeon, the beeches grow. One by one, in the high-court garden,

The statues moulder in rain and sun,

And the vast stone shields on the gates of Arden Crumble and darken, one by one.

But oh for the glory, the glow, and gladness
That rounded life in these green arcades!

For the laughter and song and the music's madness
That winged the dance down these colonnades!
Gone-with the pomp and the pride of Arden-
The glitter of jewels, the roses' glow,

And the voices that gladdened the high-court garden With music a hundred years ago!