the search for ambergris: "After you have sailed many seas and killed your whale you certainly have an exquisite perfume."
Mr. Hay was followed by Mr. Talcott Williams, who agreed with his views, and who read an extract from a native letter in Layard's works exhibiting the Oriental view of life as it bore on the tragedy under discussion.
Mrs. Osgood-Dexter sang during the evening a song entitled "I go to prove my Soul," from Browning, which was greeted with the hearty applause it deserved.
The reading from "Paracelsus" took place at the close instead of the beginning of the evening, to avoid the confusion which has hitherto resulted when two topics have come up for criticism on a single night. The readers were Mrs. Lilian G. Keys and Dr. S. Solis-Cohen, who rendered the last act of the play, "Paracelsus" was accorded a brief debate, and the meeting adjourned.
Harrison S. Morris.
"Poetry, largely consider'd, is an evolution, sending out improved and ever-expanded types,—in one sense, the past, even the best of it, necessarily giving place and dying out. For our existing world, the bases on which all the grand old poems were built have become vacuums,—and even those of many comparatively modern ones are broken and half-gone. For us to-day, not their own intrinsic value, vast as that is, backs and maintains those poems—but a mountain-high growth of associations, the layers of successive ages. Everywhere—their own lands included (is there not something terrible in the tenacity with which the one book out of millions holds its grip?)—the Homeric and Virgilian Works, the interminable ballad romances of the Middle Ages, the utterances of Dante, Spenser, and others are upheld by their cumulus entrenchment in scholarship, and as precious, always welcome, unspeakably valuable reminiscences.
"Even the one who at present reigns unquestion'd—of Shakspere—for all he stands for so much in modern literature, he stands entirely for the mighty æsthetic sceptres of the past, not for the spiritual and democratic, the sceptres of the future."
Walt Whitman, "November Boughs."
