In the meantime, those who seek literary consolation are by no
means to be urged away from their own literature, which contains a
perfect picture of our feverish times, and has implicit within it
the medicine for our ills, if they are curable. But they may be
advised to go again and more often than is now the fashion to the
writings of those men who found for their own time, a real
significance, who could formulate a saving doctrine, and who could
give to literature what it chiefly lacks to-day, a core of ethical
conviction and a view of man in his world _sub specie aeternitatis_.
It is the appointed time in which to read Dante and Milton,
Shakespeare, and Goethe, above all Plato and the great tragedies of
Greece. Our laughter would be sweeter if there were more depth of
thought and emotion to our serious moods.
THE FAMILY MAGAZINE
Readers who like magazines will be pleased, those who do not like
them perhaps distressed, to learn, if they are not already aware
of it, that the magazine as we know it to-day is distinctly an
American creation. They may stir, or soothe, their aroused
emotions by considering that the magazine which began in England
literally as a storehouse of miscellanies attained in mid-
nineteenth century United States a dignity, a harmony, and a
format which gave it preeminence among periodicals.
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