" I am Sir Oracle, and when I ope my lips let
no dog bark."  When the critic reaches this
exalted frame of mind his slight usefulness is
gone.

AFTER a debauch of thunder-shower, the
weather takes the pledge and signs it with a
rainbow.

I LIKE to have a thing suggested rather than told
in full.  When every detail is given, the mind
rests satisfied, and the imagination loses the
desire to use its own wings.  The partly draped
statue has a charm which the nude lacks.  Who
would have those marble folds slip from the
raised knee of the Venus of Melos?  Hawthorne
knew how to make his lovely thought lovelier
by sometimes half veiling it.

I HAVE just tested the nib of a new pen on a
slight fancy which Herrick has handled twice
in the "Hesperides."  The fancy, however, is
not Herrick's; it is as old as poetry and the ex-
aggeration of lovers, and I have the same privi-
lege as another to try my fortune with it:

UP ROOS THE SONNE, AND UP ROOS EMELYE
                                CHAUCER

When some hand has partly drawn
   The cloudy curtains of her bed,
   And my lady's golden head
Glimmers in the dusk like dawn,
Then methinks is day begun.
Later, when her dream has ceased
   And she softly stirs and wakes,
   Then it is as when the East
   A sudden rosy magic takes
From the cloud-enfolded sun,
   And full day breaks!

Shakespeare, who has done so much to discour-
age literature by anticipating everybody, puts the
whole matter into a nutshell:

   But soft! what light through yonder window breaks?
   It is the east, and Juliet is the sun.

THERE is a phrase spoken by Hamlet which I
have seen quoted innumerable times, and never
once correctly.  Hamlet, addressing Horatio,
says:

                            Give me that man
   That is not passion's slave, and I will wear him
   In my heart's core, ay, in my heart of heart.

The words italicized are invariably written
"heart of hearts"--as if a person possessed
that organ in duplicate.  Perhaps no one living,
with the exception of Sir Henry Irving, is more
familiar with the play of Hamlet than my good
friend Mr. Bram Stoker, who makes his heart
plural on two occasions in his recent novel,
"The Mystery of the Sea."  Mrs. Humphry
Ward also twice misquotes the passage in
"Lady Rose's Daughter."

BOOKS that have become classics--books that
ave had their day and now get more praise
than perusal--always remind me of venerable
colonels and majors and captains who, having
reached the age limit, find themselves retired
upon half pay.

WHETHER or not the fretful porcupine rolls itself
into a ball is a subject over which my friend
John Burroughs and several brother naturalists
have lately become as heated as if the question
involved points of theology.  Up among the
Adirondacks, and in the very heart of the re-
gion of porcupines, I happen to have a modest
cottage.  This retreat is called The Porcupine,
and I ought by good rights to know something
about the habits of the small animal from which
it derives its name.  Last winter my dog Buster
used to return home on an average of three times
a month from an excursion up Mt. Pisgah with
his nose stuck full of quills, and he ought to
have some concrete ideas on the subject.  We
two, then, are prepared to testify that the por-
cupine in its moments of relaxation occasion-
ally contracts itself into what might be taken
for a ball by persons not too difficult to please
in the matter of spheres.  But neither Buster
nor I--being unwilling to get into trouble--
would like to assert that it is an actual ball.
That it is a shape with which one had better
not thoughtlessly meddle is a conviction that
my friend Buster stands ready to defend against
all comers.

WORDSWORTH'S characterization of the woman
in one of his poems as "a creature not too bright
or good for human nature's daily food" has
always appeared to me too cannibalesque to be
poetical.  It directly sets one to thinking of the
South Sea islanders.

THOUGH Iago was not exactly the kind of per-
son one would select as a superintendent for a
Sunday-school, his advice to young Roderigo
was wisdom itself--"Put money in thy purse."
Whoever disparages money disparages every
step in the progress of the human race.  I lis-
tened the other day to a sermon in which gold was
personified as a sort of glittering devil tempting
mortals to their ruin.  I had an instant of natural
hesitation when the contribution-plate was passed
around immediately afterward.  Personally, I be-
lieve that the possession of gold has ruined fewer
men than the lack of it.  What noble enterprises
have been checked and what fine souls have been
blighted in the gloom of poverty the world will
never know.  "After the love of knowledge,"
says Buckle, " there is no one passion which has
done so much good to mankind as the love of
money."

DIALECT tempered with slang is an admirable
medium of communication between persons who
have nothing to say and persons who would not
care for anything properly said.

DR. HOLMES had an odd liking for ingenious
desk-accessories in the way of pencil-sharpeners,
paper-weights, penholders, etc.  The latest con-
trivances in this fashion--probably dropped
down to him by the inventor angling for a nibble
of commendation--were always making one
another's acquaintance on his study table.  He
once said to me: "I 'm waiting for somebody to
invent a mucilage-brush that you can't by any
accident put into your inkstand.  It would save
me frequent moments of humiliation."

THE deceptive Mr. False and the volatile Mrs.
Giddy, who figure in the pages of seventeenth
and eighteenth century fiction, are not tolerated in
modern novels and plays.  Steal the burglar and
Palette the artist have ceased to be.  A name
indicating the quality or occupation of the bearer
strikes us as a too transparent device.  Yet there
are such names in contemporary real life.  That
of our worthy Adjutant-General Drum may be
instanced.  Neal and Pray are a pair of deacons
who linger in the memory of my boyhood.  Sweet
the confectioner and Lamb the butcher are indi-
viduals with whom I have had dealings.  The
old-time sign of Ketchum & Cheetam, Brokers,
in Wall Street, New York, seems almost too
good to be true.  But it was once, if it is not
now, an actuality.

I HAVE observed that whenever a Boston author
dies, New York immediately becomes a great
literary centre.

THE possession of unlimited power will make
a despot of almost any man.  There is a pos-
sible Nero in the gentlest human creature that
walks.

EVERY living author has a projection of him-
self, a sort of eidolon, that goes about in near
and remote places making friends or enemies
for him among persons who never lay eyes upon
the writer in the flesh.  When he dies, this phan-
tasmal personality fades away, and the author
lives only in the impression created by his own
literature.  It is only then that the world begins
to perceive what manner of man the poet, the
novelist, or the historian really was.  Not until
he is dead, and perhaps some long time dead, is
it possible for the public to take his exact mea-
sure.  Up to that point contemporary criticism
has either overrated him or underrated him, or
ignored him altogether, having been misled by
the eidolon, which always plays fantastic tricks
with the writer temporarily under its dominion.
It invariably represents him as either a greater
or a smaller personage than he actually is.  Pre-
sently the simulacrum works no more spells,
good or evil, and the deception is unveiled.  The
hitherto disregarded author is recognized, and
the idol of yesterday, which seemed so impor-
tant, is taken down from his too large pedestal
and carted off to the dumping-ground of inade-
quate things.  To be sure, if he chances to have
been not entirely unworthy, and on cool exam-