The following aspects of this spirit of observation lie nearest to, and are the greatest supports of, invention.

Alertness of Mind. The beginning of the observing spirit is nothing difficult or profound; it is simply being awake, being interested; and that means letting the mind, the active, curious, discriminative thought, be at work behind the eye in what is seen. By its attitude of interrogation and ready welcome of facts the mind sets up a vitalizing energy which is the first impulse to luminous and ordered use of knowledge.1

Every one has his own sphere in which his mind is alert. Whatever pertains to his own pursuit or calling, for instance, has immediate appeal to him, so that he becomes an expert observer therein; the mechanic in evidences of manual skill, the farmer in soils and crops, the general in topography and strategic points. Every new interest, too, creates its province of specialized observation and keenness; witness, for instance, how soon a bicyclist acquires an expert knowledge of roads, and an amateur photographer of effective points of view. What these limited examples suggest applies, in a degree bounded only by the writer's breadth of mind, to the unlimited field of literature. It is the motive of his calling to make use of a universal special sense, by which the world is laid under contribution for enriching materials, and through

1"A faculty of wise interrogating is half a knowledge. For as Plato saith, 'Whosoever seeketh, knoweth that which he seeketh for in a general notion; else how shall he know it when he hath found it?' And therefore the larger your Anticipation is, the more direct and compendious is your search." BACON, Advancement of Learning, Book ii, p. 271.—"When I speak of a waiting mind, I do not mean a non-affirmative, non-energized, Mr. Micawber sort of mind, waiting for something to turn up, but a mind intent, a mind that goes to its windows and looks out and longs, and thrusts forth its telescope to find something. A mind thus intense, investigatory, and practically beseeching, amounts to a tremendous loadstone in the midst of the full-stocked creation — full-stocked with the materials of thought — and when this or that comes into the windows of such a mind it is stamped by that mind, and specialized to its uses, with a threefold vigor, and all the incomes thus explicitly stamped are the more explicitly germane to each other, and visibly of one species." BURTON, Yale Lectures, p. 50.

which the rudimentary work of invention, the finding of the germs of new ideas, gets itself done without effort.

Diversity of Interest. Not only to be mentally alert, but to be alert to a great variety of things, to have the perceptions trained in many lines of observation, to be not narrow and partial but having a wide horizon of outlook and taste, this is where the literary observation is called upon to go beyond the scientific. It thus becomes a perception at once specialized, in its keen penetrativeness, and universal, in its readiness to weigh new elements of the problem and make fair allowance for new points of view.1

Following are some of the good results of this diversity of interest, in forming the literary temperament.

1. To have an eye for many and various kinds of fact is equivalent to having a mastery of so many points and angles of view; and this mastery greatly deepens and enriches any single aspect of things. For no fact is isolated, no truth is known as it is until its relation with its whole realm of truth is understood. The interests of specialization itself, of getting a true comprehension of any one fact, demand that the power to observe and sympathize be varied and liberal.2

2. To cultivate diversity of view is to cultivate the ability to see through many men's eyes; and this, whatever it may

1 Of an eminent master in eloquence and letters this is said: "He habitually fed himself with any kind of knowledge which was at hand. If books were at his elbow, he read them; if pictures, engravings, gems were within reach, he studied them; if nature was within walking distance, he watched nature; if men were about him, he learned the secrets of their temperaments, tastes, and skills; if he were on shipboard, he knew the dialect of the vessel in the briefest possible time; if he travelled by stage, he sat with the driver and learned all about the route, the country, the people, and the art of his companion; if he had a spare hour in a village in which there was a manufactory, he went through it with keen eyes and learned the mechanical processes used in it."— MABIE, Essays on Books and Culture, p. 27.

2"Everything but prejudice should find a voice through him; he should see the good in all things; where he has even a fear that he does not wholly understand, there he should be wholly silent; and he should recognize from the first that he has only one tool in his workshop, and that tool is sympathy." — STEVENSON, The Morality of the Profession of Letters, Works, Vol. xxii, p. 283.

do for science, is essential to literature, which by its fundamental genius exists for no one class but for all. It is only on one side that invention looks toward its subject; the other side, looking toward readers, must take such measures of culture as will meet and satisfy their varieties of taste and temperament. This is a matter not only of education but of literary conscience.

3. To have a varied and flexible view is to have such control over one's judgments of things that the ground of estimate is not likes and dislikes, not any form of prejudice, but a recognition of what is intrinsic in each. It is thus that the literary observer learns trustworthy discrimination; he likes what is likable, in men and things, and makes just allowance whether he likes or not. A tolerant spirit this; sometimes mistaken for a spirit too weakly swayed by some new idea or fashion; but in truth it does not imperil, rather it greatly promotes while it deeply grounds, a tempered positiveness of judgment.1

The Verifying Spirit. In literature as truly as in science, the observation of fact, by which we mean in the large sense getting at the real truth of things, has to be made not more in the glow of discovery than in the spirit of caution. At every step results need to be tested and questioned, held back for verification or change, until the forward step can be taken in full certitude. This applies equally to the fact observed and to the way of relating or expressing it. It is merely giv

1 "Cultivate universality of taste. There is no surer mark of a half-educated mind than the incapacity of admiring various forms of excellence. Men who cannot praise Dryden without dispraising Coleridge; nor feel the stern, earthly truthfulness of Crabbe without disparaging the wild, ethereal, impalpable music of Shelley; nor exalt Spenser except by sneering at Tennyson, are precisely the persons to whom it should in consistency seem strange that in God's world there is a place for the eagle and the wren, a separate grace to the swan and the humming-bird, their own fragrance to the cedar and the violet. Enlarge your tastes, that you may enlarge your hearts as well as your pleasures; feel all that is beautiful — love all that is good." ROBERTSON, Lectures and Addresses, p. 797.

ing the control to the sturdy principle, Be sure you are right. This engenders a habit of self-rectification, of keeping one's head in the rush and onset of utterance, of falling back on sound sense and the plain appearance of things, which in the long run is the one guarantee of solid and surviving literary work.

In somewhat greater detail we may note here the following good effects of this verifying spirit.

1. It tempers and regulates the constructive faculty. In the glow of discussion or creativeness a writer is often tempted to say a thing not because it is true but because it is striking. The observation has been made, and the result looks plausible, but it has not been subjected to the necessary verification. The writer thus, whether his thought is correct or not, is primarily seeking not to make a truth prevail but to gain attention to a performance, or perhaps to fill out an ingenious plan; and this motive of work, sooner or later, is sure to work harm. With the verifying impulse in control, however, the solid basis of appeal is the established fact; and whatever freedom of plan or utterance there is — and the impulse, rightly employed, is no check to this - obeys the fact as a structural and emotional law.

2. It keeps the work close to the first-hand and commonsense view of things, the natural color. Learning has a way, unless regulated by the touch of earth, of piling itself up in pedantic, bookish, top-heavy systems remote from human interests. It is a tendency to be guarded against in all specialized study. The corrective to this the verifying spirit has a large hand in supplying; for its appeal is not more to the highly sublimated than to the every-day and universal observing powers.1

1 "We heard Webster once, in a sentence and a look, crush an hour's argument of the curious workman; it was most intellectually wire-drawn and hair-splitting, with Grecian sophistry, and a subtlety the Leontine Gorgias might have envied. It

3. It creates the valuable ability to hold judgments in abeyance, to tolerate uncertainty on subjects wherein verification is not possible. The merit of youthful thinkers is vigor and directness; their fault, to be overcome by ripening and deepening judgment, is rash and one-sided conclusion, made on insufficient ground. To such minds it is a pain, and seems a sin, to be in want of decision or of definite opinions; it seems to indicate weakness and vacillation. But there are occasions where just this incertitude is strength; because there are questions that cannot be settled by the first look of things, or perhaps cannot be settled at all. The verifying, patient, testing spirit is tolerant of such questions and waits for the grounded answer, or failing this, is not afraid to say, I do not know.1

II.

Habits of Meditation. The ability to think out the design of an individual work of literature is based upon a previous training, deep and long continued, wherein the writer's mind has become disposed and steadied to that kind of work. name we give to this deeper and habitual mental activity is meditation; meaning thereby not only concentrated thought

The

was about two car-wheels, which to common eyes looked as like as two eggs; but Mr. Choate, by a fine line of argument between tweedle-dum and tweedle-dee, and a discourse on the 'fixation of points' so deep and fine as to lose itself in obscurity, showed the jury there was a heaven-wide difference between them. 'But,' said Mr. Webster, and his great eyes opened wide and black, as he stared at the big twin wheels before him, 'Gentlemen of the jury, there they are, — look at 'em '; and as he pronounced this answer, in tones of vast volume, the distorted wheels seemed to shrink back again into their original similarity, and the long argument on the 'fixation of points' died a natural death.” — PARKER, Golden Age of American Oratory, p. 221.

1 "During this training in accurate observation, the youth should learn how hard it is to determine with certainty even an apparently simple fact. He should learn to distrust the evidence of his own senses, to repeat, corroborate, and verify his observations, and to mark the profound distinction between the fact and any inference, however obvious, from the fact."- ELIOT, American Contributions to Civilization, p. 215.