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the lot of all great truths, whose duration is but as the lightning flash in comparison with the long and dark night that envelops mankind. That happy time has not yet arrived when truth, as error has hitherto done, shall belong to the majority of men; and from this universal law of the reign of error those truths alone have hitherto been exempt, which supreme wisdom has seen fit to distinguish from others, by making them the subject of a special revelation.

The voice of a philosopher is feeble against the noise and cries of so many followers of blind custom, but the few wise men scattered over the face of the earth will respond to me from their inmost hearts.

From "Crimes and Punishments.»

HENRY WARD BEECHER

(1813-1887)

ENRY WARD BEECHER'S "Star Papers" show the same control of musical English which made his sermons and orations famous. They are evidently inspired by a determination to succeed in doing something wholly unlike preaching, and their success in this respect is marked. They are pleasant conversations with the reader on subjects in which all healthy people ought to be interested -books, flowers, the woods,— even "angleworms, white grubs, and bugs that carry pick and shovel on the head." He gossips over these in the most genial and companionable way, and if sometimes he shows the result of ex cathedra habits of teaching, no pupil who is worthy to be well taught will blame him for it. He was born at Litchfield, Connecticut, June 24th, 1813, and died March 8th, 1887, at Brooklyn. As a pulpit orator he ranks with Phillips Brooks whom he surpasses in power of pleasing expression, though surpassed by him in insight. As an essayist, he shows the influence of Addison and Irving, with occasional suggestions of the homely humor of Izaak Walton.

THE

DREAM-CULTURE

HERE is something in the owning of a piece of ground which affects me as did the old ruins of England. I am free to confess that the value of a farm is not chiefly in its crops of cereal grain, its orchards of fruit, and in its herds; but in those larger and more easily reaped harvests of associations, fancies, and dreamy broodings which it begets. From boyhood I have associated classical civic virtues and old heroic integrity with the soil. No one who has peopled his young brain with the fancies of Grecian mythology, but comes to feel a certain magical sanctity for the earth. The very smell of fresh-turned earth brings up as many dreams and visions of the country as sandalwood does of Oriental scenes. At any rate, I feel, in walking under these trees and about these slopes, something of that enchantment of the vague and mysterious glimpses of the past,

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HENRY WARD BEECHER.

After a Photograph from Life.

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