through a reversed world in which he and his kind feast and glory and
live in palaces and sail in yachts, and, when the boiler of the yacht
explodes, falls from the tree to the ground, becomes a tolerable
spectacle because all is merged in the unreal pictures. Or, to think of
the other extreme, gigantic visions of mankind crushed by the Juggernaut
of war and then blessed by the angel of peace may arise before our eyes
with all their spiritual meaning.

Even the whole play may find its frame in a setting which offers a
five-reel performance as one great imaginative dream. In the pretty
play, "When Broadway was a Trail," the hero and heroine stand on the
Metropolitan Tower and bend over its railing. They see the turmoil of
New York of the present day and ships passing the Statue of Liberty. He
begins to tell her of the past when in the seventeenth century Broadway
was a trail; and suddenly the time which his imagination awakens is with
us. Through two hours we follow the happenings of three hundred years
ago. From New Amsterdam it leads to the New England shores, all the
early colonial life shows us its intimate charm, and when the hero has
found his way back over the Broadway trail, we awake and see the last
gestures with which the young narrator shows to the girl the Broadway
buildings of today.

Memory looks toward the past, expectation and imagination toward the
future. But in the midst of the perception of our surroundings our mind
turns not only to that which has happened before and which may happen
later; it is interested in happenings at the same time in other places.
The theater can show us only the events at one spot. Our mind craves
more. Life does not move forward on one single pathway. The whole
manifoldness of parallel currents with their endless interconnections
is the true substance of our understanding. It may be the task of a