_out-of-doors_ by land and sea." Heaven forbid that, with only one
Atlantic between me and Mr. W.D. Howells, I should enlarge upon any
merit of the English novel: but I do suggest that this open-air
quality is a characteristic worth preserving, and that nothing is so
likely to efface it as the talk of workshops. It is worth preserving
because it tends to keep us in sight of the elemental facts of human
nature. After all, men and women depend for existence on the earth and
on the sky that makes earth fertile; and man's last act will be, as it
was his first, to till the soil. All empires, cities, tumults, civil
and religious wars, are transitory in comparison. The slow toil of
the farm-laborer, the endurance of the seaman, outlast them all.


Open Air in Criticism.

That studio-talk tends to deaden this sense of the open-air is just
as certain. It runs not upon Nature, but upon the presentation of
Nature. I am almost ready to assert that it injures a critic as
surely as it spoils a creative writer. Certainly I remember that
the finest appreciation of Carlyle--a man whom every critic among
English-speaking races had picked to pieces and discussed and
reconstructed a score of times--was left to be uttered by an inspired
loafer in Camden, New Jersey. I love to read of Whitman dropping the
newspaper that told him of Carlyle's illness, and walking out under
the stars--

"Every star dilated, more vitreous, larger than usual. Not as in
some clear nights when the larger stars entirely outshine the
rest. Every little star or cluster just as distinctly visible and
just as high. Berenice's hair showing every gem, and new ones. To