known would make no impression on its plates. Hence they were not there, said the savants, and meant simply an optical illusion produced by the magicians, and on the strength of this dictum the value of the camera in catching creatures or things that were there has been on the increase. No freaks of the imagination or nerve disorders could deceive this calm "eye of science," it was said, and the veritable figure of a dead or absent lord on the sensitive plate of an open camera in his deserted library must mean something of that lord's ability to transport himself about, independent of his body. Barring the chance of some sly page or butler slipping in to assist a materialized spirit to the lord's oak chair, one would say that it must. And just for this reason it may be well to take the advice of the higher lights and go straight on spiritualizing ourselves with a view to getting thus at the truth of the matter, however science may hobble along either with or without us. It must be easier for spirit to discern spirit than for the lens of a camera to catch up with one, and if a respectable dead man will go and sit down with a photographic apparatus there may be no reason why he would not associate with any of the least of us if we would give him proper encouragement. The dullness with which the second century man looked into the infinite deep of heaven with all the starry realms of being and deemed it but a pretty tinted cover for his flat earth, was slight beside the stupid blindness in which we walk among the invisible forces of creation, and powers that sway us on every hand in the practical belief that we are the only quickened spirits in the illimitable space. That every drop of water or atom of matter is aglow with invisible life science declares to us, but that the highest form of life, the spirit life, is everywhere we are loth to believe, because science has not adjusted its lens to capture it. As well might we declare that there is no melody in the forest nor music in the spheres, because the human ear can follow but to a certain point those vibrations of sound, which yet go on and on in divinist harmony through all creation's bounds. To listen with "soul, not ear," and catch the "quiring to the young-eyed cherubims," as the poet catches it through spirit sympathetics, is the thing the seers and singers of all ages have taught us, and yet we wait for some advance of material science to convince us that there are spirits touching us at every corner. "Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God," said the Lord of Spirits, and that appears to be all there is of it; and no time, nor condition is set to the achievement of that purity and sight. Moses, Socrates, Buddha, may all have compassed it, as the tales record, and any living creature who could bring himself to that pure, transparent atmosphere of the unstained spirit, could no doubt walk with God and the angels, whether in the body or out of the body. It is in such hours of spirit exaltation that the good and gifted ones of all ages have believed that they broke through the bars of sense and held communion with celestial beings, or with the souls of their beloved dead. And whether their belief is assured or not, at least there is enough in it to point the conclusion that it is along this spirit line that our best hope comes. Speak to him, for he hears you, says Tennyson, and there is little doubt that with that faith and understanding the communion of spirits, whether visible or invisible, ought not be difficult to establish. Everything in the universe has its own medium of life and communication, and innocence and trust may be more en ticing to spirits than all the scientific courtesies of the schools. Poets like Shelley and Wordsworth have believed that sweet and guileless infancy holds long a close and glad relation to the angels, ere the "shades of the prison house begin to close about the growing boy," and it may be that here, as elsewhere, it is the little child who can best show us the way into the kingdom. A pretty story of one of these little ones comes from a fair suburban home not far away. Two children, John and Mary, were born to that home, and, as the old poet has it, "grew in beauty side by side," while all nature bowergowned and blossomed about them and filled their souls with its joy. Cultured Christian parents nurtured them and a little leaf-embowered church and Sunday school gathered them in for wondrous stories of heaven and the angels. But one sad day a shadow fell across the threshold and in the wake of it Mary slipped away to another country. The parents mourned her as dead, but Johnny, who had been told that she was an angel, went out under the spreading elm where they had been wont to play together to find out about it. And there, shortly, his mother found him, in great joy, playing, as he insisted, with the little sister who had come when he called her and promised to be his playmate still. For days and weeks he played about the old haunts, or rambled through the woods in the avowed companionship of the departed sister, and the astonished parents, who watched him curiously, found him talking, laughing and sporting gleefully as with some visible playmate. He did not die, nor go into a fever, nor develop any of the brain diseases nor eccentricities that science might have expected of him. But one day he came in sadly and told his mother that Mary had gone away and could not come to play with him any more. Of course the psychical societies make short work of such cases, and there may be plenty of them among the imaginative children of the land. But, after all, in their trusting simplicity, they come perhaps as near to the spirit truths in the matter as "the obstinate questionings" and "blank misgivings" of older creatures, "moving about in worlds not realized." A FEATURE OF THE HOUR HE literary man in politics is a feature of the hour. Not that he is a new figure there, but rather that he is not. It is the change of front that counts. The blot on a Dryden's genius and the national star on a Lowell's is the measure of that change. It is the difference between cowering and commanding, leading and being led, and in days past, even John Milton himself was not free from the spoiler's touch. The poet in exile and the poet in a President's cabinet points the progress of the world in the direction of the literary statesman and politician, and republican America clearly keeps up with the procession. Poets and romancers, playwrights and fable makers are in high demand as legislative candidates and members of Congress, and even law, medicine and pedagogics are hunting the man who knows how to keep romance alive in his heart. Nobody questions that this may be the way of refreshment for murky politics and musty law. To have the guardians of the central fires let in to their courts and caucuses must inevitably do something to warm and refine their paling altars. But for the high priests, or priestesses, of the sacred flame, themselves, what of them? Are they to keep their souls alive and fed at the ward meeting, or the boodler trial, or find an influx of the divine afflatus in the trooping stream of applicants at ambassador's or executive's door. Alas, every peaceful spring of Helicon, or "many fountained Ida” cries out against such sacrilege, and |