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 28 acceptance of life's tragedies is of value only when it prompts us to guard more jealously, or to impart more freely, life's manifold benefactions. Mr. Pater has subtly defined the mental attitude which is often mistaken for sympathy, but which is a mere ineffectual yielding to depression over the sunless scenes of earth.

"He"—Carl of Rosenmold—"had fits of the gloom of other people, their dull passage through and exit from the world, the threadbare incidents of their lives, their dismal funerals, which, unless he drove them away immediately by strenuous exercise, settled into a gloom more properly his own. Yet, at such times, outward things would seem to concur unkindly in deepening the mental shadows about him."

This is precisely the temper which finds expression in much modern verse. Its perpetrators seem wrapped in endless contemplation of other people's gloom, until, having absorbed all they can hold, they relieve their oppressed souls by unloading it in song. Women are especially prone to mournful measures, and I am not without sympathy for that petulant English