The Hive

The thing called the New Race-the passion of poets, the phantom running ahead and forever calling the dreamer and revolutionist and occultist, is far from a reality as yet among the commonplaces of the world. It is the spirit of everything worth while, but that means nothing to one who has not a breath of it in his own body.... A story went forth from this shop recently in which certain ideals and presences of the new social order were carried through to a cheerful ending. The publisher wrote, "Yes, but what is the New Race?"

It's a fair question, but remember one cannot adequately describe a spiritual thing in terms of matter. It is only possible of portrayal where it has broken through into terms of three-space. First you are apt to get the nearest and most striking picture of the New Race at your own supper-table-the presence of one of your own children, especially if the young one is hard to understand.

Parents and children of all times have found confusion and alarm in each other's ways. But there are rare periods of human history when the difference between two generations has been not a normal and superficial crack, but an abyss. It is so now. The Old has reached its climacteric point of destructivity. All self-passions destroy themselves in time. Fear, greed, sensuality-all are self-destructive. Great human numbers and decadent principles have been recently broken down in the world with a swiftness and abandonment heretofore unrecorded, except in the traditions of planetary flood and flame....

You may watch closely the child under seven who plays in the Unseen, whose companions are not in the room for older eyes; watch the one of fancies and fairies and fragrances which others cannot quite discern. Many a child has been driven with a soul-wound into corroding silence by parents who thought they were punishing falsehood, when they were in reality repressing the imagination-the faculty which master-artists denote as the first and loveliest possession of the creative mind. Too coarse and unlit to see what the child saw, the parents again and again have looked gravely at each other, saying:

"This is a crisis. Our child has begun to lie. We must forget her own feelings and punish her--"

So often it is her-but not always. The boys who are to do the great tasks of song and prophecy and architecture-they, too, dream dreams and see visions and have the rapt eyes of Joan in the forests of Domremy; they, too, are severely questioned by the pharisees; none escape this scourging; they, too, in many cases shall be put to death.

The new ideals of the parenthood, education, romance, are now being introduced and promulgated by pioneers long since emerged from the old litter and humus. Education will mean first of all a turning for power to the Unseen. The quest of the Swan and the Star and the Beloved, are never carried along on the levels and inequalities of the earth-always the uplifted face for the saint and the sage and the seer. Great parents kneel beside their children and beg to be delivered from the heaviness which holds them to the dim shadows, where the child sees face to face. Education will mean finding his intrinsic task for the child-the intensive cultivation of the human spirit from the Soul outward, not alone from the brain inward.

The quest of the passing age was for Gold. The real meaning and symbol and glory of gold, as the highest, smoothest and most finished of minerals, has been lost in the bulkier products and possessions it meant to measure and signify. More and more has gold itself hid away from vulgar hands and been represented by objects intrinsically inferior. We now behold a civilisation destroying itself for commodities and destroying the commodities for which the destruction began.

Gold itself will serve Beauty in the coming age; commerce will serve ?sthetics. The lovers of Beauty begin with the sand, with the clay. They love nature from the ground up; they are fervent for light and air, for sun and sky and water, for fruits and grains and bees, for stars and rains and romances. They say such things are holy. Words are inadequate for their loves and appreciations. They find the ways to love God infinite. They see Him in stone and stream; they see Him in the eyes of the deep down men; they see Him risen and inevitable in the eyes of their lovers....

Straight goodness will not do for the New Race, nor straight intellectuality. Artists, singers, painters and idealists will be the heroes of the generations to come, for they will add the quest of Beauty to the unwashed goodness of the saints and pilgrims.

These are but flaring points; one is embarrassed in short space because of a myriad things to say. Free verse is a sign of the New, also the dream of a free world and the planetary patriotism. The immanence of the spirit of all things, is a sign; the sense of the underlying oneness of humanity; not alone the Fatherland, but the Kinterland, where new Fountains are established and sages and masters come for inspiration-all these, like a passing train of wonder, a glimpse of many cars....

I think I can bring the picture in closer by using a few pages of work from one of the young men with me. His name is Steve. I called him The Dakotan,[1] in the book, Child and Country. We've romped and ridden together for three years, and I've known Steve better every day-still far from the end. The rest of the chapter is Steve's writing:

NORTH AMERICANS

Out of the centuries of moil and mix and fuse of Europe, the orient and the north countries, a gleaming archetype has emerged here which may be called the real North Americans. They are scattered here and there among the younger generation-young people new in name only; in soul they are as old as Zeus. Often they are strangers in their father's house. They blend the mind of the occidental with the soul of the east; splendid firstlings of an untried future. They betray themselves by their genius. Heredity is the first fetich overthrown by them.

From the first they are a law unto themselves. They cast off churches, codes, creeds, schools and parents as preliminary steps in their teens. In the twenties they are prodigies, leaders in the arts or the revolutions. It is their aim to over-reach themselves, not to further a type. Very early they conjourn together in secret and obscure places, revolting against life as it is lived, like a handful of white dwellers in a foreign city.

There is always an alien, intangible something about these people. One senses the double life they lead, their own, and others. Conditions are not yet adjusted for them. They are super-nationalists, the first mark of the new. They are dreamers who make their dreams come true in matter, and first among their dreams is of the planet in one piece. They are naturally intolerant of barriers and partitions. They see ahead a new social order vast and shining as a devachanic vision-the real democracy of the future. They see that the new has come in not to kill, but to build. Theirs will be the spiritual heroics. Yet all this, of the greater patriotism, must not yet be spoken. It only alienates them the more from those they must live with. Their arch enemy is Ignorance, personified so often in their elders.

It is noticeable that these young people are healthier, stronger, swifter, sharper, tougher, bolder and at the same time lighter and finer than the passing generation. They have the new healthiness. They belong to the open and are practically immune to disease. Theirs is the health of sun and wind and spirit-vitality instead of constitution, something the old can never understand. Constitution is weight, solid, ungiving. Vitality is volatile, springy, electric, constantly being given, constantly being acquired, self-refining. Constitution does not change; it accumulates all it can, then begins to die....

The young women of this new Race are open, strong, eye-to-eye, free spoken. They are capable of friendships; they are not adverse to being wholly understood by males. They are not popular with ordinary women, who surmise their superiority but comprehend it not. Deceit, jealousy and such common disturbances evident in the sex are unknown to them. They have character and are lovely rather than beautiful. They are apt to go half way in their love-making, for who should know better when the chosen father of their children arrives.

All of these people are bringers of true love. Love is their philosophy and religion. They listen to the heart as well as the brain. Others think them cruel in their discrimination in mating. They take all or nothing-prodigious riskers, great sufferers, throwing even love's dream on the board to be played for, and laughing as they play. The slightest blight on the loved one is deepest agony.

Perhaps the surest way of discovering these young giants is to search about for the most sorely harassed children. Invariably they are put to it, to break into this day and generation. They fight their way up through all the banked-up ignorance and antagonism of unlit humanity. Often they are solitaires, coming and going with the secrecy of kings and eagles.

A few pages of drift first of all with the younger boys.... There is a lane of Lombardy poplars from the Lake to the interurban car-line-a half mile. It is a lifting walk at any time, but summer evenings are wonderful with all the sounds and scents of a true pastorale-lake-breath and meadow-lands, the whole sky to look at, and the murmuring dissonance of the poplars. Often we walk to the car with passing guests. One evening a guest went away whom we loved very much. A lad of seven, named John, and I walked back from the car alone.

He was ignited. I felt this at last through his hand. I had been thinking about my own things all too long, missing the beginnings of his talk.... He hurried forward in the dusk, speaking in a hushed rapt voice. Because I had missed the first part, I said: "John, I want you to write that-either to-night or to-morrow."

And this is what came in:

The Magic Lane:

It was at dusk. Two people left their tracks in Nature's dust road.

Love is found on that road. It is the road of the mystics.

They leave their love in it; Nature kisses their feet.

Many horses' feet have been kissed on that mystic road.

That mystic road will last forever.

I long to walk upon that road of love.

Love on that road will last forever.

It is all true love.

Our friends have been met on that road of love.

It leads to the Hills of God.

Certain spelling matters have been corrected. We pay little attention to spelling in the work here. The young ones learn by reading and get the proper look of a word altogether too soon in many cases. There was another high moment from John at the same time. The following three lines have stood out from the period with memorable magic:

Wonder

The soft breath of the Mother came in through the window of vines.

The stars were shining like the face of the New Generation.

My spirit was away in the Hills. A noise at the door brought me back--

John then fell into a psychological tangle which we found little profit in following. By the "Mother" he referred to Nature.... The verse period has passed for the time. Around the age of seven, boys change. Often, as in this case, they are not so interesting for a while afterward. John is coming nine now and is writing "action" stories with all the worn and regulation props and settings. The early tendency will return with a dimension added. All transitions are times of disorder, but they are followed by larger areas and truer fulfilments of order. A cloud falls upon the sanctuary, but when it is dispelled, one perceives a lifted dome, bright with its new cloth of gold.

I am struck every day in dealing with young boys how wisdom and beauty and truth can be inculcated in their lives, without pain and strain to them, and with great profit to the teacher. The young mind is quick to change. It has not grown its pharisaical ivory....

The sanction of a boy must be won on a physical basis. A man must know what the boy knows and go him one better. The man must understand boy points of view, but never expect the boy to be puerile. Parents of the past generations have had the steady effrontery to expect very little from children. "Why, they are only children!" has done more to make for vacuousness and drivel than any other visionless point of view, none of which has been missed. There is a difference in ages, to be sure. The child's mind has not massed for use the external impacts of twenty or thirty years of life in the world, but there is also an Immortal within-a singer, hero, builder, or a teacher possibly, eager to manifest through the child's fresh mind, fervid to bring the mind of the child to its subjection, for the expression of its own revelations. Indeed, the parents themselves are enjoined to become as little children. In arriving at this wisdom and humility, they may suddenly find masters in their own children.

There is also a lad here of seven named Tom. Yesterday I found him beside me on the sand, down by the water's edge. I began to tell him about the Inner Light that we all carry. You can talk over a child's head, if your words are choked with mental complications (which is apt to be second-rate talk, anyway), but you seldom are out of reach of a fine child's grasp when you speak of spiritual things. He was sitting cross-legged, folded hands between his knees-a little six pointed star-head and shoulders the three upper points, knees with folded hands between, the three lower. He was bare from the waist up and thighs down, and brown as the honey of buckwheat.... I told him that the seventh and perfect point of his star was within; that if he shut his eyes and kept very still, putting away for the present all his thoughts about himself, his feelings, his wants and his rights-looking into himself as one would look ahead for a lamp in the night, listening deep within, as one would listen for the voice of a loved friend,-I promised that at last he would see what the three wise men saw-the Star in the East. He need only follow that Star and be true to its guidance to come at last to the Cave and the Solar Babe.... After that I hinted that I would come to his feet and listen.

Tom felt that it was worth trying for at once-shut his eyes, turning all thoughts and gaze within. He held the posture long.... I have marvelled again and again at the quickness with which the child-mind attains to concentration so essential for all original production. The little ones have no mad emotional lists to sort out and subdue; their wants are simple "yes" and "no" in so many cases. Indeed, they are spared the struggle of becoming as little children.... Tom held the posture, until I was actually tense from the strain of waiting and keeping my thoughts from calling his.

It was a picture-sun-whitened hair, long yellow lashes, brown body with a bit of babe's softness left to it, and glorious sunlight. He opened his eyes at last saying that he had the door, where the light was, almost opened, when a fly bit him.

I thought of the perfection of the instance of the mind's waywardness-the coming of the Master spoiled by a fly bite.... Tom will search for his Star every day. It is strange that he is closer to the hill-pastures around Bethlehem, under seven, than for years afterward.

To learn concentration in mid-life after the world "has been put through a man," is an ordeal at best; and yet we are by no means masters of ourselves, nor capable of significant achievement until the brain can be stilled at will of its petty affairs (the first aim of concentration) and becomes the glad servant of the "giant" within.

A little later I saw Tom on the back of a huge black walk-trot saddle-horse of show quality-passing up the Lane at a fast clip, his feet half way to the stirrups, holding on to the saddle with one hand, the bridle-rein in the other. A year or two ago I should have been afraid to permit that, but we manage now to relieve the young ones of a large part of our fears for their welfare. Children have enough to overcome from their parents. Frequently the New Age young people have to master their heredity before they begin upon themselves.

Life is a big horse to ride, so often a black horse. It is well to start children free and unafraid. We do not let them dwell in thought of pain. We do not permit tears. We inform them early that to be sick is a confession of uncleanness, that lying is for the use of cowards only, and that to be cruel marks the idiot.

We are occasionally serious over repeated failures, but we laugh over things done well. Tennis has unfolded marvellous possibilities in the training of will force. Children are shown that there is a mystic quality to all the perfect games-that the great billiardists and tennis and baseball players perform feats in higher space, whether they know it or not. There is the essential ideal first in the making of the athlete as in the making of the poet. The great moments of play require faculties swifter and more unerring than the human eye or hand or mind. Ask the master of any game if he had time to think in pulling off the stroke that won. It is inspiration that he uses quite the same as the poet in his high moments.

Education is the preparation of the mind to receive and answer to inspiration from a plane above. The more you develop merely the brain of a child, the more he is detached from the great principles of being, the more also is he closed to the real, and subjected to the danger of actual lesion and sickness. The more you develop the spirit of a child, or rather give the significant One within an opportunity to come forth and be the child, the more you make for beauty, health, goodness and glory of bodily life.... A lucky day when you start really to associate with your children, luckier still when you undertake the work of teaching them incidental to your own work. Then and there, you begin to realise that children are close to a source of things that you cannot touch. Presently you realise that they are teaching you....

Day after day I have studied and practised the development of the child from within outward. I have seen the capacity to synthesise and assimilate mere mental matters developed in a year, by training the mind from the centre of origins outward, that mental training alone could never accomplish. The mind itself becomes vigorous and avid and capacious and majestically swift. It is trained to express its true self. That is power-that is king-play. This sentence covers the whole matter:

The perfect way to develop the mind of the child is to teach him to sit and listen at the feet of his own master, the Soul.

The right to live and to bring the laughter of power to the days must be won afresh each morning. No two days alike. We make ourselves impossible to children of the New Age by trying to confine them in the laws and rules of yesterday. The young people whom I serve live in a different intensity. Their interest flags if I repeat, if I fall into familiar rhythms. Continually they spur me on. I think, after all, great teaching is the capacity to feel what the younger minds are thinking. If we are too coarse to catch the first warning of their resistance, they slip farther and farther from our grasp.

It would not seem possible to hold American young people with spiritual affairs; yet this is done daily. We call the Unseen-the great gamble. I have shown how all else betrays-how all matter is a mockery at the last-that even love and friendship fail for those who are called to weep and worship wholly at the tomb of the body.... The truth is out: The beginnings of real teaching is in making the Unseen interesting and dramatic.

We dwell upon the mystic white lines which connect all things-the sources of daring and beauty and creativeness. I ask my young people where they were-when they did any rare and improved bit of work, when they felt like great comrades, met some magnanimous impulse, arose to superb instants of play, or when in Chapel the big animation touched us all and set us free. They always answer that they were out of themselves.

That's a secret of the new teaching again-to lift the students out of themselves. Men take to drink or drugs for this same reason: men and women set out on the great adventures, pleasures and quests for this. We hunger and toil for this freedom; we suffer and adore-to get out of ourselves. Mental teachings tie us in more firmly. The teaching here-and no two days alike-is to startle and encourage the young minds to arise and live and breathe in that lovelier and more spacious dimension which at least borders upon the Unseen. The doors open and shut so softly. One does not know he has been out-until he is back with strange light in his eyes and in his hands a gift from the gods.

The essential spirituality of the new teaching must not be confused with religious affairs as they are known and exploited in the world. You cannot teach the New Age religion of the world's kind. It has its own. No dry as dust sage will do. A snort will answer your sanctimoniousness; flexible science will reply to the abysses of your logic.... You must be the consummate artist if never before in your life, to teach the beauty of the soul to youth. The young workers of the new social order will never bring forth their great harvests from your reflected light. You must be spontaneous-you must flood them with pure solar gold; you must show them by your life and your work, how you come and go into the Unseen.

There is no rest.... One commands his disciples to go forth at last. The teacher strides forward faster when they cling. He tells them one day they must race the gamut to follow him; and the next day he puts another in his place and begs to be allowed a cushion in the midst of the children.... We hold them by setting them free-the first law of love. All unions of the future-in trade and friendship and matrimony-will be founded upon the principle of freedom; and this is the essence of the new teaching-to liberate the children into their larger and God-quickened selves.

No rest and no two days alike.

A Bob White called me this morning across the uncut hayfields at the edge of the lake-bluff.... His two smooth and patient notes seemed to contain the secret of putting off all fret and fear and unrest. He seemed to ask if I had not done this already-had not yet put all boyish and merely temporal things away? "Not yet?... Not yet?" he called the question.

I answered that I would try again, and I set out straightway to be honest once more with the world, with the soil and with myself. I would begin with the clay again to be clean-to rise and think and dwell in cleanliness, to think no thought, to perform no action second-rate-to begin with the Laugh again-the warm laugh of conquest that always opens some inner door to fresh powers-to arise afresh in the glory and gamble of the Unseen.... I returned and saw the young ones one by one-from Tom and John up to the men and women-doing their work. I set about mine with a laugh and called the day good. The teacher knows best who is taught.

* * *

An interesting boy of ten and I have been much together in the open weather. We have learned many things, but nothing more important than what a sham Fear is. I do not mean that we take chances or that it is wise to risk life or limb. Fine discrimination is back of all training in the arts of life; still we certainly have found that Fear is a waster and diminisher of beauty and power-and that it can be mastered.

About the most fascinating thing that life has shown me is the way in which fine examples of the younger generation learn the deeper matters of life-matters of self-mastery which make the very presence of a lad significant to a stranger, and which formerly were supposed to be secrets for the sons of kings alone.

"Do you fear anything?" I ask. "Look deep. Listen deep-do you fear anything?... It's like the pain that tells you of a weakness or disease. Fear is an unerring reminder of a task of conquest ahead for you. That which you fear most is the thing to conquer first."

There had been much of this talk of Fear before a laughable personal experience showed me how much I asked.

I crossed a mesa and came to an abrupt drop-off-two hundred feet sheer. It astonished me. I hadn't experienced anything like this quiver of horror for years. All members and muscles bolted at the thought of advancing closer to the edge. I sat down to think it out. It never had occurred before that I wasn't my nervous system, and must not let it get me down.

The more I thought, the more I perceived that I must do the thing I dreaded so. In fact, I had told trusting young people that they were not their bodies, not their emotions, not even their minds-that these must be made to obey. Here I had a chance to prove if I were less in action than talk. I forced my fluttering young self to the edge.... Dizziness-wobbly limbs, fancied shoves from behind, the call of the huge shadowed space below, a queer sense of parting in mid-air, the body thumping down, another and liberated self gladly spurning the ground-all these symptoms of panic followed swiftly.

I held until calm came, and I then could study this little coil of forgotten fears-a civilised mess.... The weakness was absurdly easy to overcome after the will was once aroused. There's no end or limitation to will force when awakened. The greater the man, the more awe he has for this subject. There's a glow that follows conquest of any kind; the mere call of the will to action brings a sense of power in the heart. There is no way more speedily to dispel pain, anger, passion, fear, or any of these tentacles of personality-than to summon the power of will to instant action. The particular matter of this precipice showed me a trick about calling up the force-priceless to me afterward in bigger tests, and for opening the way of self-conquest to boys.

One must decide what one wants to do-then carry it out to the death. Discrimination, art, all culture and knowledge may be brought to bear in making the decision-but after that, it must be carried out-just that.

Fears belong to the abdomen. You can feel them there. They are quicker than thought. Perhaps you had a twinge of nerves over some sight or sound or odour, before your mind could tell you what you were afraid of.... I have often told the young ones here-listening a bit to my own voice-that there isn't anything living or dead, phantom, shell, or living soul, that has got the authority to make the spirit of man quail.

Courage is spirit.

Most people don't care to try to deal with it; they let it have its way.... Do you recall the fears of the dark room as a child-fear always stealing behind-upstairs alone, the rush to the light, almost screaming tension?... I heard a patter of steps the other evening and knew the whole story-a boy of seven. He had been sent upstairs without a light. I sent him back, told him to stay there until he got himself in hand-to stay in the dark and think the bogie down. He was well afterward.

I have known some under-fire work. A man soon gets himself in hand to look straight at a white-fringed trench. Fear of sharks furnished another test. From a child the deep-sea devourers had an exquisite fascination for me-to be cut in two under brine, white belly, backward mouth, black-rimmed, hairy pig eyes, the double-rows of teeth.... Pacific Islanders swim in the same harbour with fourteen-foot scavengers, careless of whole schools of monsters, yet scurry to their boats at the sight of one solitary, different fin. I had seen the so-called, man-eating brutes, "grey nurses," dim grey horrors with dull black spots. A well-fed imagination also came into play.

I went swimming in the surf with a splendid Australian chap-a doctor home from the trenches.... He left me back in the surf lines and started out to sea. I finished my swim decently in toward North America, and lay on the strand. From time to time off in the sunset I saw my friend's head.... I was glad to grab the beach-comber when he came in.

"It's all perfectly sane and splendid," I said, "and I'm glad to have you back for supper with us, and the billows out yonder are doubtless all that you say, for an afternoon's lie-up, only I venture to ask-what if a grey nurse should happen in from the lower islands?"

"You don't think about them," he said.

That's about all there is to the fear subject. You don't let it get you. There is nothing worth fearing in or above or under the plane of manifestation.... So I tried that out in deep water. The old horrors succumbed like the fear of the precipice, but not so readily, quite. One can imagine keenly in the dim deep; the touch of sea-weed quickens all the monsters of the mind....

There's nothing fit to be afraid of, unless it is the self. When we get the ape and the tiger, the peacock and the porpoise, the lizard and the shark and the carcajou of our own natures mastered, there isn't anything left to do but to tally them off outside, a friendly finish with them all. No menagerie is complete as man's, and each of us favours some species from time to time.

I have thought much about fear. In another place I told how we have overcome inertia; how we developed senses through the hard administry of fear and hunger, anger and the rest. Now, however, these must be overcome.... One of the last physical fears to let go in my case is that for the hangman's rope. I think Roger Casement really wanted the axe in preference to the hemp. Steadily facing a repulsion, it surely vanishes.

The point of it all is that you can teach self-command to the children.... I took a girl of fourteen to my precipice-left her there standing on the very edge. After a few minutes I called. Her face was calm as if she had gazed from a porch....

"Did you feel any fear?" I asked.

"Only yours for me," she answered.

It was very true. I had the thing whipped for myself, but it had been hard to leave her there.

Finally I took the smaller boys out for a test. They didn't know I was testing them. Children haven't the fear of height such as we put on. I recalled a score of episodes of my own boy-days, in which I startled the elders by Sam Patch imitations. Also I have put the young ones through some deep water affairs....

You may not be able to get it quite-but all fear is illusion. Every inner beast mastered makes us stronger. These animals within are our cosmos to rule. We do not know how beautiful they are until we lose our fear for them. Boys and girls here are learning these things and putting them in action.

The kingdom of heaven is also within. Fear, passion, anger, poverty, and the like-all represent areas of our own kingdom not yet brought under perfect cultivation.... After the emotional and physical conquests come the psychic ones-hard matters of mastery pertaining to the heart and mind-to know, to do, to dare, to keep silent-then the finding of the hidden treasures of the subconscious, mystic fleets that sail those dim seas, as yet uncharted for most of us.... After that, the Soul. At last we must be potent enough to stand eye to eye in the presence of the King Himself.

From looking steadily over an escarpment of two or three hundred feet drop, to gazing at the world from the forward cockpit of an airplane at two or three thousand feet, isn't such a long step as you would imagine. The fact is, I was in no way terrified in my first flight, and fear certainly crawled me full length as I stood that time at the edge of the mesa. Our young people have the call to test the new dimension of wings. This zeal corresponds in a unique way with the new education. Intellect stays upon the ground. Intuition is the lifting of the wings of the mind.

I had already begun to make friendly visits to an aerodrome at the edge of the Pacific when the following letter came from the Abbot,[2] who is now seventeen and in New York:

... Perhaps Steve told you that I had a ride in an airplane about three weeks ago. Man! 'Tis the place for me! Next summer, soon as school dissipates, I attach my name to the Royal Flying Corps. The psychic effect of a flight is wonderful-like travelling over a very tall bridge. The Atlantic coast for many miles lay in profile as a map, the roads stretched as thin mathematical lines; forests as darker shadows of the earth; New York as a blotch of smoke and curious patchwork. For twenty minutes we sailed around and around, just as you've seen a gull pinion, then we came to earth; waited until it got dark, then up again.... Lights of the aerodrome lay like jewels upon the earth, but up, up we went, faster and higher, the roar of the propeller providing a steady nervous outlet. I could shout my lungs out-I had to relieve myself of the excess thrill.

Then what should happen? Red, a tiny rim, like the disc of a golden dollar, the sun began to lift up from the horizon again. The higher we went, the higher it lifted, until there it hung, as a golden bulb, a swollen orange off in the mighty stretches,-pure, golden,-while below twinkled the town's lights. 'Twas the fullest, richest, most brimming moment I've ever had. The awe of the cosmos overtakes the heart and lays down its stupendous laws. The distance between sun and 'plane seemed a golden pathway that ever could absorb your flight. I was aware only of worshipping God, and that roar of the machine made one think of the roar of the planets, comets, meteors, all the suns, roa-oa-ring. What a romance! Finding the sun!

... No discussion of the fear element whatsoever in the letter....

The old thrills won't do for the new race. I took a pair of screen-trained young ones to a circus recently and became absorbed at their mild boredom. Alcohol is too slow and coarse for the wastrel tendencies of the modern hour. The sad ones of the new generation use high potency drugs to forget the drag of time and space. A new dimension is required in all things. The young men of the new race make light of our old dreads and are learning winged ways to heaven and to hell.

* * *