study of his childhood and youth must give a new hold upon life to any
one who will appreciatively respond to it.

A better illustration of the subtle worth of such literature, in
developing appreciation of those inner deeps of child life that escape
definition and evaporate from the figures of the statistician, could
scarcely be found than Pierre Loti's "Story of a Child." There is hardly
a fact in the book. It tells not what the child did or what was done to
him, but what he felt, thought, dreamed. A record of impressions through
the dim years of awakening, it reveals a peculiar and subtle type of
personality most necessary to understand. All that Loti is and has been
is gathered up and foreshadowed in the child. Exquisite sensitiveness
to impressions whether of body or soul, the egotism of a nature much
occupied with its own subjective feelings, a being atune in response to
the haunting melody of the sunset, and the vague mystery of the seas,
a subtle melancholy that comes from the predominance of feeling over
masculine power of action, leading one to drift like Francesca with the
winds of emotion, terrible or sweet, rather than to fix the tide of the
universe in the centre of the forceful deed--all these qualities are in
the dreams of the child as in the life of the man.

And the style?--dreamy, suggestive, melodious, flowing on and on with
its exquisite music, wakening sad reveries, and hinting of gray days of
wind and rain, when the gust around the house wails of broken hopes and
ideals so long-deferred as to be half forgotten,--the minor sob of his
music expresses the spirit of Loti as much as do the moods of the child
he describes.

Such a type, like all others, has its strength and its weakness. Such a
type, like all others, is implicitly in us all. Do we not know it--the