NOTE. If one has come upon a beautiful nook in the forest, or found an angle from which the surrounding landscape can be more thoroughly enjoyed; or if he knows a picture which others, less fortunate, have not yet fully discovered, he feels it not only a pleasure but in some deep sense an obligation to share his happiness with his friends, known or unknown. To be sure there are always many to say: "But I was familiar with that nook years ago; the outlook you mention is not so desirable as such another, near-by; the picture you name is as old as the hills; you have given us nothing new." Yet there are those, too, who reply gently: "It is a lovely nook "-and look at him understandingly. Others say gratefully, “I would not have sought this point of view myself, but I shall always claim it henceforth as one of the things really my own." And still another will answer frankly: "I have seen that picture many times, but it never before possessed for me the meaning that it now has in this setting." As with pictures and outlooks, so with authors and books. Not to the students and lovers of the great men cited in this little volume are these fragments of their thought presented; but to the many more who know their names, have even read their books, but whose angle of vision was perhaps at the time of reading not precisely what it now is. Here are gathered a few suggestive and characteristic paragraphs from strong thinkers: Carlyle, with his gruff voice and tender heart, his quick impatience, his grand bursts of poetry and sweeps of lofty, inspiring thought; with his denunciation of whatever is false and his profound sympathy and tolerance toward all creatures who need help and opportunity to develop ;-Ruskin, the extremist, "the one man," some one has said, “whose life has been in perfect accord with his highest theories;"-Amiel, that sensitive, introspective idealist, who reached ever toward the light, though he never fully came to it or learned the secret of happiness; -and Charles Kingsley, of whom it has been told, "he bore about with him the tenderness of the priest, the insight of the poet, the wisdom of the philosopher, and the courage of the MAN." It is with no word of apology that I offer to the public which has so generously received the " Don't-Worry-Nuggets" and its selections from Epictetus, Emerson, George Eliot, and Browning, this companion volume and supplement. JEANNE G. PENNINGTON. New York City, August, 1899. |