Dead Authors
posterous only in the assumption that the human race has waited for centuries to receive its revelations.
We have been told that the Great War stands responsible for our mental disturbance, for the repeated assaults upon taste and credulity before which the walls of our minds are giving way. Mr. Howells, observing rather sympathetically the ghostly stir and thrill which pervades literature, asked if it were due to the overwhelming numbers of the dead, if it came to us straight from sunken ships, and from the battle-fields of Europe.
What answer can we make save that natural laws work independently of circumstance? A single dead man and a million of dead men stand in the same relation to the living. If ever there was a time when it was needful to hold on to our sanity with all our might, that time is now. Our thoughts turn, and will long turn, to the men who laid down
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