BOOK-TALK.
LAST month we remarked upon the spirit in which thoughtful men look out upon what theologians call "the world" (ranking with it the flesh and the devil as among the enemies of the soul) and what metaphysicians call the relative, the conditioned, the Non-Ego, and many fine names beside,—the little stage of human action upon which men play their brief parts, with all the little aims the little triumphs, the little failures, the little joys, the little sorrows, that seem so great to little men. We grouped thoughtful men into two classes,—those who are appalled by the emptiness and vanity of life, and those who are amused by it. Of course it was merely a rough classification; these two main groups are subject to infinite subdivision. Not all who renounce the world renounce it in the same temper, not all who accept it accept it in the same way. Few studies are more interesting than to mark the attitudes which men of various shades of opinions present to the world. Some, as the ascetics of all ages and faiths, deny it, and flee to cloister, hermitage, or some spiritual isolation. Others believe with Mrs. Browning that
God hath anointed us with holy oil
To wrestle, not to reign,
and that to refuse to enter the lists is an error. "I cannot," says Milton, in a well-known passage, "praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and seeks her adversary, but slinks out of the race where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust or heat." Pascal wondered at the folly of those who "pass their life without reflecting on its issue. The carelessness which they betray in an affair where their person, their interest, their whole eternity, is embarked, strikes me with amazement and astonishment: it is a monster to my apprehension." Seine, on the contrary, laughed at the folly of men like Pascal who puzzle their brains over the unknowable:
By the sea, by the dreary, darkening sea,
Stands a youth,
His heart all sorrowing, his head all doubting,
And with gloomiest accent he questions the billows:
"Oh, solve me life's riddle, I pray ye,
The torturing ancient enigma
O'er which full many a brain hath long puzzled,
Old heads in hieroglyph-marked mitres,
Heads in turbans and caps mediæval,
Wig-covered pates, and a thousand others,
Sweating, wearying heads of mortals,—
Tell me, what meaneth Man?
Whence came he hither? Where goes he hence?
Who dwells there on high in the radiant planets?"
