Page:In the dozy hours, and other papers.djvu/18

 4 which should stand on a sacred shelf apart, and over them a bust of Hermes, god of good dreams and quiet slumbers, whom the wise ancients honored soberly, as having the best of all guerdons in his keeping. As for the company on that shelf, there is room and to spare for poets, and novelists, and letter-writers; room for those "large, still books" so dear to Tennyson's soul, and for essays, and gossipy memoirs, and gentle, old-time manuals of devotion, and ghost lore, untainted by modern research, and for the "lying, readable histories," which grow every year rarer and more beloved. There is no room for self-conscious realism picking its little steps along; nor for socialistic dramas, hot with sin; nor ethical problems, disguised as stories; nor "heroes of complex, psychological interest," whatever they may mean; nor inarticulate verse; nor angry, anarchical reformers; nor dismal records of vice and disease parading in the covers of a novel. These things are all admirable in their way, but they are not the books which the calm Hermes takes under his benign protection. Dull, even, they may be, and provocative of slumber; but the road to fair dreams